标签： Oceania

In a rare display of bipartisan unity on Thursday, members of the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to approve a measure that would suspend their own salaries for the duration of any future government shutdown, a step designed to force lawmakers to share the financial burden that falls on federal workers and American citizens when funding gridlock brings federal operations to a halt.

The move comes in direct response to a string of crippling funding standoffs that have disrupted the federal government repeatedly over the past eight years, leaving millions of Americans facing disrupted public services, delayed benefit payments, and growing anger at the pervasive political dysfunction in Washington D.C. The proposal has its roots in the widespread public criticism that followed recent extended shutdowns, when hundreds of thousands of federal employees were forced to work without pay or placed on unpaid furlough, while members of Congress continued to receive their full salaries on schedule.

Sponsored by Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is not affiliated with the prominent Kennedy political family that produced former President John F. Kennedy and 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the measure requires the Senate to withhold pay from all sitting senators any time funding expires for at least one federal agency or department. Withheld salaries would only be released to lawmakers once the shutdown ends and full government funding is restored.

Unlike binding legislation, this resolution applies exclusively to the operation of the Senate and does not require approval from the House of Representatives or a signature from President Donald Trump to take effect. However, a longstanding constitutional ban on adjusting congressional pay mid-term means the rule will not go into force until after the upcoming November midterm elections.

The string of funding crises that prompted this vote stretches back to the start of Trump’s current term in office. Most recently, the federal government suffered a 43-day shutdown last year amid a bitter dispute over expired Affordable Care Act subsidies. That was followed earlier this year by a 76-day partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, the longest partial department shutdown in U.S. history, triggered by clashes over funding for immigration enforcement operations.

Speaking ahead of the final vote, Kennedy emphasized that the existing system, which insulates lawmakers from the financial harm of shutdowns while ordinary workers bear the cost, is unacceptable. “We ought to hide our heads in a bag. It’s got to stop,” Kennedy said, adding that, “Shutting down government should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences.”

Kennedy framed the bill as a necessary incentive to push lawmakers to reach funding agreements and avoid future shutdowns, acknowledging that he had pushed for a stricter original proposal that would permanently withhold pay from senators during shutdowns and bar them from leaving Washington while a funding lapse is ongoing. Even so, he framed the unanimous vote as a step toward the shared sacrifice he says is needed in Congress. “This is about putting our money where our mouth is,” he told his fellow senators ahead of the vote.

After months of gradual reintroduction to public life following cancer treatment, Britain’s Princess Catherine has wrapped up her first official overseas visit since her 2024 cancer diagnosis, closing out the two-day trip to Italy with a hands-on pasta-making workshop in the scenic region around Reggio Emilia.

The 44-year-old Princess of Wales, who confirmed her cancer was in remission in January 2025, crafted traditional tortelli — a regional stuffed pasta comparable to ravioli — at a countryside farmhouse hotel outside the northern Italian city. Working alongside local chef Ivan Lampredi, the princess kneaded dough, added savory filling, and cut out the signature pasta shapes, joking at one point, “Sorry, I’m very slow,” to which the chef offered a reassuring response.

The entire trip centered on one of Catherine’s longstanding advocacy priorities: early childhood education, a cause deeply personal to her as the mother of three children — Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 11, and Prince Louis, 8. On the morning before the pasta workshop, she visited a local preschool that employs nature-based learning methodologies, as well as an educational center designed to teach young children about sustainable recycling practices.

When Catherine arrived in Reggio Emilia on Wednesday, hundreds of enthusiastic local onlookers lined the streets to greet her with cheers, marking a warm welcome for the princess’s first foreign official outing in more than two years. Her previous overseas royal engagement came in December 2022, when she accompanied her husband Prince William, the heir to the British throne, to Boston for the annual Earthshot Prize awards ceremony focused on environmental innovation.

Catherine first shared her cancer diagnosis publicly in March 2024, announcing that she had begun a course of preventative chemotherapy while opting not to disclose the specific type of cancer. She stepped back from most public duties during her treatment, before revealing in early 2025 that her cancer was in remission. Since that announcement, she has slowly resumed public engagements, building up to this full overseas working visit.

A long-time champion for early childhood development, Catherine founded the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood in 2021, an initiative dedicated to raising global awareness of how foundational early life experiences shape long-term health and outcomes for children.

A pivotal debate over the future of the European Union’s long-term budget has taken center stage at the 2026 Charlemagne Prize ceremony in Aachen, Germany, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called for sweeping structural reform to align the bloc’s spending with 21st-century challenges. The event, which honored former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi for his decades of work advancing European integration, became a platform for confronting longstanding frictions over EU fiscal policy and competitiveness.

The 27 EU member states are currently locked in tense negotiations over the 2028-2034 multiannual budget. A bloc of so-called frugal nations, led by Germany and the Netherlands, has already pushed back against a substantial spending increase proposed by the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. Speaking at the award ceremony Thursday, Merz, a conservative leader, argued that the EU’s current budget framework is hopelessly outdated. “We cannot meet the challenges of the 21st century with a 20th-century budget,” he declared, echoing growing frustration across the bloc over stagnant budget structures that have not shifted in decades.

Merz backed a landmark 2024 competitiveness report from Draghi, which warned that the EU risks falling behind global rivals the United States and China without a fundamental shift in policy. He criticized that the EU budget’s core content and structure has remained virtually unchanged for generations, with more than two-thirds of all EU funding still allocated to redistribution programs and direct subsidies. For decades, the EU has leaned heavily on these subsidies and redistribution mechanisms to offset economic disruptions from internal trade integration and support less wealthy eastern European member states as the bloc expanded. But Merz argued this model is no longer fit for purpose, calling for an overall reduction in unnecessary budget spending and a major reallocation toward investments that boost EU competitiveness and collective defense.

Despite backing Draghi’s call for increased joint investment, Merz drew a firm line against the funding mechanism Draghi proposed: collective debt issuance by all EU member states. “Excessive indebtedness threatens sovereignty and limits the capacity to act,” Merz stated. Analysts widely note the comment also carries weight for domestic German politics, where the country relaxed its long-standing strict constitutional “debt brake” rules only last year, after years of adhering to rigid fiscal limits, to fund increased defense and infrastructure investment.

In his acceptance speech for the Charlemagne Prize, which recognizes individuals who work to advance European unity, Draghi offered a sharp critique of the bloc’s overreliance on external free trade deals as a growth driver — a long-standing priority for German economic policy. Draghi argued that pursuing new trade agreements is far easier than tackling “unfinished work at home,” a reference to the EU’s incomplete single market. He noted that reform requires confronting entrenched vested interests that benefit from fragmented energy markets and an incomplete single market, choices European leaders have long avoided.

Draghi, who also served as Italian prime minister from 2021 to 2022 and led the ECB from 2011 to 2019, is widely credited with preventing the collapse of the euro during the 2010s eurozone debt crisis. His successor at the head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, reinforced his calls for urgent action in a speech delivered the night before the ceremony, noting that global competition has shifted dramatically. “The United States and China have entered a new age of industrial strategy and geopolitical competition — intensified by tariff wars and rare-earth battles — and all this amid the worst energy crisis on record,” Lagarde said, echoing Draghi’s warning that the EU must act fast to avoid falling behind in global competitiveness.

In a high-stakes address to Australia’s House of Representatives delivered shortly after 7:30 pm Thursday, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor laid out the Coalition’s far-reaching policy blueprint for tackling the country’s soaring cost of living, locking in a series of contentious pledges that have already divided political circles across the nation.

Against a backdrop of a federal budget shaped by global volatility stemming from the Middle East conflict – one where the ruling Labor government has pushed forward sweeping reforms to housing investor tax breaks including changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing, policies the Coalition has already promised to reverse if elected – Taylor’s reply positioned the opposition as a sharp alternative to Labor’s agenda. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has framed Labor’s tax changes as a critical step to rebalance Australia’s increasingly unaffordable housing market and improve equity for first-time buyers, but Taylor rejected that framing outright, labeling the new levies on housing and small business a “stealth raid” on hardworking Australians striving to improve their financial standing, an unfair assault on personal aspiration.

The most eye-catching proposal in the Coalition’s plan is a hard cap on net overseas migration, tied directly to the annual number of new housing completions across the country. Taylor stressed that under a future Coalition government, “Never again will a government be able to bring in more people than our housing can support. That’s our commitment.” To address the current national housing shortfall, Taylor confirmed migration levels would be held “significantly below” the cap for the first several years of a Coalition term, delivering what he called “one of the biggest cuts to immigration in Australian history.” He declined to release a precise numerical target ahead of the next election, arguing that setting a fixed figure now would be reckless, and hit out at Labor for consistently overshooting its own migration targets, drawing jeers from government benches in response.

Beyond the migration cap, the Coalition laid out a suite of further border and visa policy changes: the existing Australian Values Statement will become an enforceable condition for visa approval, permanent visa holders will be legally required to learn English, enhanced border screening will be implemented to block radical extremists, Temporary Protection Visas will be reinstated to crack down on what Taylor called “frivolous protection claims” via a formal list of safe countries deemed free of persecution, and the government will move to process and deport 70,000 visa overstayers who have no legal right to remain in the country. “Those who criticise the law being enforced must explain why their sympathies lie with illegal overstayers instead of with migrants and Australians who abide by the law,” Taylor said.

On housing, the Coalition plans to unblock stalled residential construction projects and inject $5 billion into supporting core infrastructure including new roads, water networks and sewage systems. Taylor said these investments, paired with deep cuts to burdensome regulatory red tape, will unlock 400,000 new homes and reduce the cost of a newly built home by as much as $70,000. Taylor also targeted the 2,000-page National Construction Code introduced under Labor, arguing its thousands of overlapping rules add tens of thousands of dollars to new build costs, with the Coalition aiming to shrink the code to roughly 200 pages. Additional deregulation is planned for the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act as well.

On tax policy, the Coalition introduced its Tax Back Guarantee, which will index the two lowest income tax thresholds to inflation starting in the 2028-29 financial year. Taylor explained this reform will fully protect 85% of Australian income earners, delivering an estimated $250 in relief in the first year of the policy, growing to more than $1,000 annually by the fourth year. Starting in 2031-32, the two highest tax thresholds will also be indexed to inflation, extending full protection from bracket creep to all Australian taxpayers, a change Taylor described as once-in-a-generation tax reform. For small businesses with annual turnover under $10 million, the policy makes the immediate asset deduction of up to $50,000 a permanent measure, to encourage ongoing business investment.

In a further contentious shift, Taylor confirmed the Coalition will restrict access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and 17 other welfare programs exclusively to Australian citizens, excluding permanent residents from accessing these benefits. “My message is this: If you commit to Australia, then Australia will commit to you,” Taylor said. “After all, the taxes paid by hard working Australians should support Australians.” The policy drew immediate mixed reactions even across the political sphere: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson quickly claimed the entire budget reply was “replete with One Nation policies,” arguing the Coalition had stolen longstanding One Nation proposals after previously dismissing the minor party as having no workable ideas. But senior Coalition figures defended the plan, with Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson telling the ABC the policy aligns with a growing global shift among European nations, arguing “it has to be on the basis of they come, commit and contribute” to access public benefits. Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson told Sky News the policy of restricting welfare to citizens is “right and proper,” though she declined to specify how much taxpayer money the change would save.

On economic and fiscal policy, Taylor announced that a future Coalition government would deposit 80 cents of every dollar in resource revenue that exceeds forecast projections into a new Future Generations Fund. The fund will be used to pay down Labor’s projected $1 trillion in national debt and fund new nation-building infrastructure projects, with 25% of fund allocations directed to regional communities that Taylor said have been neglected by the current Labor government. Taylor also rejected Labor’s tax breaks for electric vehicles, noting the majority of benefits flow disproportionately to high-income households, and confirmed the Coalition would collaborate with the Albanese government on NDIS reform, an unusual point of bipartisan agreement in an otherwise combative address.

On national security, Taylor argued that in an era of global “coercion, crisis, and conflict,” Australia must prioritize greater self-reliance. A Coalition government will develop a formal National Security Strategy and appoint a dedicated National Security Adviser, with defense as the central pillar of the strategy. Unlike Labor, which projects to hit the 3% of GDP defense spending target by 2033 via a planned $53 billion spending increase over 10 years, Taylor committed the Coalition would meet the 3% of GDP target immediately, accusing Labor of accounting trickery to delay the investment.

Overall, Taylor’s address stayed largely aligned with the Coalition’s longstanding policy priorities: pushing back against high mass migration levels, criticizing big government overspending, and highlighting the growing cost of living crisis that has made the traditional Australian dream of a single-income earner saving for a home deposit increasingly out of reach for many. Taylor closed by outlining his core vision for the country: “to revive the freedom that Australians have lost under Labor. Not a government-directed economy – a free-enterprise economy. Not bigger government – better government.”

Just months after ending 14 years of Conservative Party rule with a historic 2024 general election victory, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer finds himself locked in a desperate battle to retain his job, as internal party unrest triggered by disastrous local election results paves the way for a potential leadership challenge from his former deputy, Angela Rayner.

The crisis erupted last week when Labour suffered catastrophic losses across regional and local polls. Voter backlash stripped the party of its decades-long control of the devolved Welsh Parliament for the first time in history, while it failed to close the gap with the pro-independence Scottish National Party at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Far-right Reform UK and left-wing Green Party made massive gains at Labour’s expense, reflecting widespread public discontent with Starmer’s performance over his 22 months in office. To date, four junior government ministers have resigned, more than 80 Labour members of Parliament have publicly called for his departure, and yet Starmer has remained defiant, vowing to hold onto power despite the growing mutiny within his own party. “I know I have my doubters, and I know I need to prove them wrong, and I will,” he stated during a defiant appearance earlier this week.

A major new development upended the crisis on Thursday, when Rayner announced that UK tax authority HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) had cleared her of allegations of deliberate wrongdoing connected to a past tax affair. The 46-year-old left-wing working-class champion was forced to step down from her posts as deputy prime minister and housing secretary in September over an underpayment of property duty on a southern England flat purchase, which also found her in breach of the ministerial code. On Thursday, she confirmed that HMRC had exonerated her of claims she intentionally sought to evade tax, after she settled £40,000 ($54,000) in outstanding tax obligations. “I welcome HMRC’s conclusion, which has cleared me of any wrongdoing,” Rayner said in an official statement. “I set out to pay the correct amount of tax. I took reasonable care and acted in good faith, based on the expert advice I received, and HMRC has accepted this.”

The clearance removes a major barrier to Rayner entering a leadership contest, prompting widespread speculation that she could soon throw her hat into the ring. While she has stopped short of directly calling for Starmer’s resignation and told media she would not be the one to trigger a leadership race, she told *The Guardian* that she would step into “whatever role I can” to deliver the change party members and voters demand. Earlier this week, she issued a blunt assessment of Labour’s electoral collapse, writing “What we are doing isn’t working, and it needs to change.”

Beyond Rayner, other potential challengers are also positioning for a run. Multiple UK media outlets reported Thursday that Health Secretary Wes Streeting, a 43-year-old figure popular with Labour’s centrist and right-wing factions, was preparing to resign imminently to launch a leadership bid. Streeting is unpopular with the party’s left-wing base, which broadly favors Rayner or Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham for the top job. However, Burnham is currently ineligible to run, as he does not hold a seat in the Westminster Parliament.

Under Labour Party rules, any candidate seeking to challenge Starmer must secure the backing of 81 Labour MPs – equal to 20% of the party’s parliamentary cohort – to trigger a formal leadership contest. With more than 80 MPs already having called for Starmer to step down, the threshold is within reach for a coordinated challenge, leaving Britain’s government facing a period of unprecedented political instability just six months into its first term after ousting the Conservatives.

Australia’s ruling Labor government has suffered a significant political setback, with a new post-budget poll revealing a dramatic surge in support for right-wing populist party One Nation that has shaken the country’s political landscape.

The latest Roy Morgan survey, carried out between May 13 and 14 among 2,300 registered voters via text messaging, is the first major independent poll released since Labor handed down its controversial 2026-27 federal budget, which included proposed changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax rules for housing investors. The data shows One Nation has overtaken Labor on primary vote support, hitting 32 per cent compared to Labor’s 28.5 per cent.

When looking at two-party preferred voting, the poll shows One Nation and Labor are neck-and-neck: 49 per cent of respondents said they would back One Nation against Labor, leaving the incumbent government with just a tiny, statistically insignificant edge. When matched against the center-right Coalition, One Nation claimed a narrow 51 per cent to 49 per cent two-party preferred lead. For context, the Coalition currently trails far behind both One Nation and Labor on primary votes, sitting at just 45 per cent, giving One Nation a clear lead over the traditional major conservative party.

The poll also delivers a damning verdict on the performance of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers. A 59 per cent majority of Australian voters disapprove of Albanese’s job performance, compared to just 40 per cent who approve. For Chalmers, disapproval stands at 57 per cent. This dissatisfaction cuts across demographic lines: it spans both genders, every age bracket, and nearly all Australian states. Only Tasmania recorded a narrow majority of approval for the Prime Minister.

A breakdown of voter motivation highlights stark differences between the two parties’ support bases. For Labor voters, top drivers are shared values around social justice and fairness, cited by 42 per cent, and alignment with party policy, named by 39 per cent. In contrast, 58 per cent of One Nation voters said cutting immigration was their core motivation, while 52 per cent identified their vote as a rejection of the two long-dominant major parties.

One Nation’s rising electoral momentum comes off the back of a recent milestone for the minor party: it recently secured only its second ever lower house seat, with David Farley winning the seat of Farrer vacated by former Liberal leader Sussan Ley. The Coalition has already promised to repeal Labor’s controversial housing tax changes if it wins office, adding further volatility to the policy debate.

Most critically, the poll projections indicate that if a general election were held now, the most likely outcome would be a hung parliament, regardless of whether One Nation faces off against Labor or the Coalition. This result points to a sustained collapse in support for Australia’s traditional major parties, and a growing shift toward anti-establishment politics in the country, with the 2026-27 budget’s contentious tax changes acting as a catalyst for One Nation’s latest surge.