Jasper Lindell
Jasper Lindell is a Legislative Assembly reporter at The Canberra Times who links ACT politics and government decisions directly to how people experience public services, development and the city’s culture. Since joining the masthead in 2018, he has built a brief that moves between tax and spending debates, party dynamics, infrastructure and everyday civic life. Alongside his hard news reporting, he maintains a wide feature portfolio on development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, including regular contributions to the paper’s Panorama magazine. He also writes as a restaurant reviewer and travel writer, giving his political coverage a consistent grounding in places, institutions and stories that define the ACT’s public sphere.
ACT politics, parties and government machinery
Lindell’s core beat is the ACT Legislative Assembly, where he follows government policy, opposition scrutiny and internal party tensions in detail.
His reporting on party dynamics has covered Greens and Liberal figures stepping down from roles, resignations from campaign teams and MLAs breaking their silence over controversies, showing how personal decisions intersect with party culture and strategy. He tracks investigations and allegations within the Assembly, including sexual misconduct claims and their repercussions for individual members and party reputations.
He regularly reports on tax, spending and fiscal policy, examining how reviews and commissions judge the territory’s revenue mix, rates and stamp duty settings, and what “dramatic changes” are required to meet agreed timetables. Coverage of ACT expenditure has included pieces on spending growth relative to the economy and the implications of Productivity Commission findings for the territory’s budget settings.
His work on watchdogs and integrity focuses on resourcing reviews, calls for stronger oversight and procurement investigations such as Operation Kingfisher, where he traces the role of ministerial offices and bureaucratic processes.
Lindell also follows the intersection of politics and community frustration, reporting on issues such as residents left waiting for compensation after a power surge, where he connects household-level damage to government responses and accountability. His Assembly and government stories often carry direct invitations for further information from readers, signalling a reporting style that aims to surface systemic issues through individual cases and formal inquiries.
Public services, planning and infrastructure
Beyond the chamber, Lindell writes extensively on the delivery and reliability of public services, with a particular focus on transport, childcare and city operations. His coverage of public transport has ranged from reporting on Australia’s largest electric bus depot and its impact on “dead running” and service frequency to scrutinising system outages such as the NXTBUS failure across the territory’s network.
In these pieces he connects technical changes and operational problems to commuters’ daily experience and to the government agencies responsible for keeping services running.
Childcare and regulation are recurring themes, including stories on centres banned by regulators after serious medical incidents and repeated compliance issues, where he highlights both regulatory action and the consequences for families. He reports on industrial relations in city services, covering workers backing industrial action and union warnings about stalled pay talks, and sets those disputes against the backdrop of council responsibilities and budget constraints. Housing and planning appear in his work through coverage of Canberrans’ dissatisfaction with the cost of new homes and falling trust in ACT planning performance, tying resident sentiment to policy targets and delivery outcomes.
Food, travel and city life
Lindell maintains a prominent strand of restaurant and travel writing that treats food and place as part of the capital’s civic story rather than a separate lifestyle beat. As a restaurant reviewer, he writes about venues such as Rebel Rebel in New Acton, presenting it as a destination that can convince sceptical visitors of the city’s appeal and emphasising consistency and the absence of “dud” meals. He has reviewed Italian-focused Gianni’s and the Kingston restaurant Onzieme, paying attention to kitchens run by people “who actually find food interesting”, service warmth and how these venues contribute to neighbourhood character.
His travel features extend that interest in place to destinations beyond the territory, including a piece on Magnetic Island that frames the location as feeling like another world despite being just offshore. In these stories he uses detailed observation of landscape, hospitality and atmosphere to situate trips within a broader sense of Australian life and leisure.
Together, the food and travel strands show a reporter who treats restaurants and journeys as part of the same fabric as politics and planning, with attention to how people inhabit cities and regions.
Heritage, books and the arts
Lindell’s politics coverage is complemented by sustained work on heritage, local history and literature, reflecting a long-standing interest in the capital’s cultural institutions. He has written on the history of The Canberra Times itself, marking milestones such as the paper’s 95th anniversary and restating its commitment to serve “the national city and through it the nation”, placing the masthead in the context of the capital’s struggles and triumphs.
His author and event work includes moderating conversations for literary launches and “salon-style” discussions, such as a National Library event with Meanjin and a university event around a debut novel, where he brings his reporting sensibility to public discussions of contemporary writing.
In arts coverage and commentary he writes on books and authors with a focus on their place in Australian and local literary culture, including tributes to figures like Marion Halligan and ongoing writing on books for the paper.
His X profile and external bios emphasise that alongside ACT politics he writes on books and related arts topics, reinforcing that literature is a core part of his brief rather than an occasional sideline. Across heritage columns, author events and literary pieces, Lindell’s work shows a reporter who integrates institutional memory and cultural life into his political beat, treating the stories of newspapers, writers and public spaces as part of the same civic narrative.
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