Caitlin Cassidy

Caitlin Cassidy is a reporter for Guardian Australia who covers business stories where corporate decisions intersect with public services, policy and everyday life. Her reporting follows the flow of money, governance and accountability through institutions such as airlines, universities and research bodies, with an emphasis on how those decisions affect people rather than markets.

Corporate responsibility and the business of travel

Cassidy’s coverage of Qantas shows how she approaches corporate stories through individual incidents and their broader implications. In her report on a passenger being banned from Qantas after allegedly biting a flight attendant on a long-haul service from Australia to the US, she treats the event as both a human story and a test of an airline’s duty of care and response protocols. She traces how the airline handles misconduct, what consequences follow for the passenger, and how the episode fits into wider concerns about safety and behaviour on international flights.

Across this kind of work, she focuses less on stock performance and more on operational standards, customer experience and the systems that are supposed to protect staff and passengers. Her business lens is grounded in questions of responsibility, regulation and how large transport companies manage risk and reputation when crises or unusual incidents occur.

Money, policy and the education sector

Cassidy reports extensively on the business side of education and research, looking at how funding decisions and governance shape academic work and student life. In an article on the suspension of a A$870,000 grant to a high-profile pro-Palestine academic, she follows the chain from ministerial intervention to the research council’s decision, showing how political pressure can directly alter the flow of public research funding. She sets the episode within the structures that allocate money to universities and researchers, drawing out the financial and professional consequences of a single grant being frozen.

Her work on contentious definitions of antisemitism in Melbourne similarly sits at the intersection of policy, institutional reputation and community relations. She examines how councils and other bodies adopt or contest formal definitions, and what that means for their obligations to different groups. These pieces treat education and civic institutions as business entities whose choices carry both legal and financial implications, not just symbolic ones.

Within this sub-beat, Cassidy often follows the lifecycle of decisions from cabinet or board level through to campuses and classrooms. She is interested in how rules, funding models and governance frameworks translate into job security, research opportunities and the lived experience of students and staff. Her stories frequently connect abstract policy changes to concrete outcomes such as suspended grants, altered programs or shifting codes of conduct.

Institutions, infrastructure and public impact

Cassidy’s broader archive shows a recurring focus on large-scale projects and institutional structures that reshape public space and services. Her work includes reporting on futuristic steel infrastructure set in remote, arid environments, highlighting how major construction and energy projects are financed, justified and received by local communities. She treats these as business stories about investment, returns and corporate strategy, but always alongside questions of environmental impact and social license.

When she writes about debates over definitions of discrimination or contested political language, she treats councils, universities and other bodies as actors whose policies have operational and financial consequences. She tracks how reputational risk, lobbying and public pressure feed into boardroom decisions, and how those decisions in turn affect funding, partnerships and community trust.

Across sectors, Cassidy’s work is characterised by close attention to documents, decisions and the mechanics of governance. She frequently works in a straight news format, filing timely pieces on emerging disputes, suspensions or incidents, and then returning to them as policy or legal processes unfold. Her stories favour clear timelines, specific figures and named decisions over opinion or colour, which makes her coverage useful for understanding who made which call, when, and with what immediate implications.

Reporting style and formats

Cassidy mainly writes news reports, often on tight turnarounds, but many of her pieces have an explanatory layer that maps systems and structures around the immediate event. She uses plain language, foregrounds the people most affected and breaks down complex governance issues into accessible sequences. Numbers such as grant totals, budgets and costs are present but are framed in terms of what they enable or prevent, rather than as abstract financial metrics.

Her stories often begin with a specific incident or decision — an alleged assault on a flight, a grant being suspended, a council adopting a controversial definition — and then widen out to the institutional and business context. She is consistent in returning to accountability: who holds power, how they exercised it, and what mechanisms exist for review or redress. That through-line distinguishes her from a generic business reporter focused on markets or executive profiles; Cassidy’s beat is the business of public institutions and the consequences of their choices.