[2] She has written four issues of Quarterly Essay: "Great Expectations – government, entitlement and an angry nation" in June 2012, "Political Amnesia – how we forgot to govern" in November 2015,[6] "Follow the Leader: Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman" in September 2018[7] and "The High Road: What Australia Can Learn From New Zealand" in November 2020.

[10] She also won the Paul Lyneham Award for Press Gallery Journalism in 2004 and was shortlisted for the John Button Prize for political writing in 2010.

[12] On 1 May 2023, Tingle was appointed staff-elected director at the ABC, winning by 30 preferential votes from 2073 ballots over business journalist Daniel Ziffer.

On the day of the 24 June 2010 leadership spill in the Australian Labor Party, Tingle wrote in the AFR that the upheaval was “the ultimate flexing of union and factional power to unseat a prime minister, a move so brazen that it left the cabinet, and the caucus, in the dark.” [15] Tingle reflected on the 2010 Gillard coup against Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in the 2015 Quarterly Essay, 'Political Amnesia', where she wrote "here was a coup that was ill-conceived, ill-constructed and catastrophic, one that showed us how such manoeuvring could have a material impact on the rest of us.

[17] Tingle received a Walkley Award for this article in 2011, in recognition of her “independent mind taking an impartial approach to an often confusing political landscape.

"[18] During the first year of Prime Minister Gillard’s leadership, Tingle wrote in the AFR on 5 December 2011 following the annual Australian Labor Party Conference, “if Tony Abbott is the hollow man, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has emerged from the weekend’s ALP national conference as the shallow woman.”[19] In a political analysis of Gillard’s first cabinet reshuffle on 13 December 2011, Tingle regarded that “it fails both the self-interest and national interest test.”[20] Responding to the Australian Labor Party’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook report under Prime Minister Gillard in 2012, Tingle wrote in the AFR on 26 October 2012 that “the government, Tony Abbott observed yesterday, has a political strategy but no economic plan.

The government, they would say, has an economic plan but is not so sure about the political strategy.”[21] In the 2015 Quarterly Essay, 'Political Amnesia', Tingle wrote that “Tony Abbott won office in 2013 on a platform of undoing things: reversing specific measures like the “carbon tax,” but also removing the sense of chaos which voters felt surrounded the Gillard government.”[22] In the AFR on 17 September 2015, Tingle described leadership coup against Prime Minister Tony Abott as "the end of a particularly poisonous period in Australian politics" in which "Australia has been pushed sharply to the right, pushed far enough that it even created cracks within the Coalition.

"[23] Two years later, Tingle described Abbott as an "utter destructive force, an utter waste of space this man has been on the Australian political landscape", questioning his contribution to Australia’s “polity that has not involved tearing something down.”[24] When Abott’s successor Malcolm Turnbull resigned as Liberal prime minister ahead of an internal party leadership spill in 2018, Tingle described the coup on the ABC as a “pointless political assassination: an ideological war but a campaign redolent with spite and personal ambition.”[25] On the day he resigned, Turnbull chose Tingle as the first of a small number of reporters permitted to question him at his final press conference.

[3] On an ABC News Daily episode on 7 October 2022, commemorating the 10th anniversary of Gillard’s Misogyny Speech, Tingle described Gillard as "one of the last great Parliamentarians and she made her name as a parliamentarian by some absolutely crushing speeches on the run.”[28] While working for the Australian Financial Review in 2018, Tingle accepted a role as host of the Association of South East Asian Nations business summit in Sydney from 17-18 March 2018 at the invitation of the Department of Prime Minister And Cabinet.

ABC managing director and editor-in-chief David Anderson called the tweet, which Tingle had deleted, a "mistake" during a subsequent Senate Estimates hearing.

[32] During an editorial for the 7:30 program on 3 March 2021, Tingle spoke on the removal of the Morrison government's Attorney General Christian Porter after he denied an allegation raised by the ABC that he had assaulted a woman when he was a teenager.

This is now the issue the prime minister, who is standing by his attorney general, has to consider.” [34] On the eve of the referendum vote for the Albanese Government's proposal for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, Tingle wrote on the ABC that "a No vote — and how we got to one — will change the way we see ourselves, and send the most unloving of messages to Indigenous Australians”.

"[36] In a response to an audience question at a book launch for journalist David Marr’s book Killing for Country, Tingle referred the internal ABC Voice Tracker as an inadequate measure of balanced reporting, commenting that “this is nuts... completely sick… In the interests of trying to be balanced [...] we’ve ended up not doing a good job of covering the referendum debate.”[37] In a statement issued on 14 October 2023, Tingle clarified her remarks from the book launch, stating “this is an issue that I think is an exceptionally difficult one for the media generally, not just the ABC, and not just in terms of this campaign, at a time when political messaging is splintering into social media messaging, and the old rules of political campaigning are changing…The ABC has provided unprecedented levels of coverage from around the country of the referendum campaign, particularly from Indigenous voices, and I’m very proud of the work my colleagues have done in often very stressful circumstances.”[37] Throughout May 2024, Tingle argued on a number of platforms that Peter Dutton was weaponizing migrants for political reasons.

In a post-budget column for the AFR on 17 May 2024, subsequently published to the ABC on 18 May 2024, Tingle wrote that “the significance of a major political leader [Dutton] playing so divisive a card on our community is a step that shouldn't go unnoticed [...] It is deadly simple, but very dangerous, politics.” She concluded that “a hugely complex issue has been reduced to a populist and misleading piece of political mischief.”[38][39] At the Sydney Writers Festival on 26 May 2024, Tingle expanded on her written statements, stating that, on evening of Dutton’s address-in-reply to the budget, “I had this sudden flash of people turning up to try to rent a property or at an auction, and they look a bit different – whatever you define different as – and he has given a licence for them to be abused where people feel they are missing out.