标签： Oceania

The European Commission is set to unveil a sweeping new policy proposal on Wednesday that aims to transform fragmented European cross-border rail travel by mandating a \”one journey, one ticket\” system, according to insider sources familiar with the plan. The initiative is rooted in Brussels’ broader climate goal of shifting passenger travel away from carbon-intensive short-haul flights and onto rail, a far more sustainable alternative for intra-European trips.

Australia’s federal government has tabled what is widely labeled the most sweeping set of budget and tax reforms in a quarter century, but independent analysts warn that even these ambitious changes will not stop the nation’s gross central government debt from crossing the $1 trillion threshold in the coming years.

A surprising diplomatic workaround has cleared the way for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to join President Donald Trump on a high-stakes state visit to Beijing this week, even though the top American diplomat has been hit with multiple entry bans and sanctions from Chinese authorities over his past criticism of Beijing. This unorthodox solution, which centers on changing the Chinese transliteration of Rubio’s surname, has broken a months-long diplomatic deadlock that once appeared to block him from joining the historic trip.

This is the first visit to China for the 54-year-old Cuban-American secretary of state. Before he joined the Trump cabinet as the nation’s top diplomat, Rubio served decades in the U.S. Senate, where he built a reputation as one of Washington’s most vocal hardliners on China. He led the drafting of landmark congressional legislation that imposed sweeping economic sanctions on China over unsubstantiated claims of forced labor among the Uyghur ethnic minority in Xinjiang, and he repeatedly spoke out against Beijing’s policy in Hong Kong. During his Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state earlier this year, Rubio openly labeled China an “unprecedented adversary” to the United States, a stance that aligned with his long-held anti-communist views.

China first imposed sanctions and an entry ban on Rubio during his time in the Senate, retaliating for his sharp criticism of Chinese policy — a move that mirrored the sanctions the U.S. regularly imposes on foreign officials it accuses of human rights violations. By the time Trump nominated Rubio to serve as Secretary of State after the 2024 presidential election, the existing sanctions tied to his name had created a major diplomatic stumbling block.

Two anonymous senior diplomats familiar with the behind-the-scenes negotiations have confirmed that Chinese officials found a creative way to bypass the entry restriction: adjusting the Chinese character used for the first syllable of Rubio’s surname, “lu”, in official government documents and state media coverage shortly before he took office in January 2025. Because the original entry ban and sanctions were formally issued under the old transliteration of his name, the small linguistic adjustment effectively unties Rubio’s new role as secretary of state from the existing restrictions.

As of Tuesday, the Chinese Embassy in Washington had not issued any immediate response to requests for comment on the name change and the upcoming visit. A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department declined to share additional details about the negotiations, confirming only that Rubio would be traveling with Trump. Photo and on-the-ground reporting from Joint Base Andrews outside Washington shows Rubio boarding Air Force One alongside the president ahead of the trans-Pacific trip.

Since taking office as Secretary of State, Rubio has aligned his public stance with President Trump’s approach to China. Trump has repeatedly described Chinese President Xi Jinping as a personal friend, and has prioritized expanding bilateral trade relations while downplaying public discussion of human rights issues. Even so, Rubio has broken with softer approaches on some matters: last year, before he took office, his public statement that the Trump administration would not negotiate away Taiwan’s status as a self-governing democracy in exchange for a new trade deal was widely welcomed by government officials in Taipei.

Thirteen-year-old Adelaide student Sebastian Muñoz-Najar has not yet reached his teens, cannot legally hold a full-time job, and is years away from learning to drive. But even this primary school graduate is already consumed by despair over one critical life question: will he ever be able to afford to own a home in his own country?

Against a backdrop of non-stop headlines about Australia’s deepening national housing affordability crisis, Sebastian began running the numbers himself using little more than a Google search and a basic calculator. What he found alarmed him: if current trends of skyrocketing property prices and stagnant wage growth hold steady, the average Adelaide home will cost 17 times his projected annual income by the time he completes university.

Australia’s housing affordability emergency is no longer a contested political issue – across the political spectrum, policymakers and the public agree the country is in crisis. What has divided the nation and gridlocked legislative action for more than a decade, however, is how to fix it. Now, the federal government is moving forward with a polarizing set of reforms: eliminating long-standing, lucrative tax breaks for property investors, a change it argues will begin to address the intergenerational inequality that has come to define Australia’s housing market.

For younger Australians like Sebastian, the promise of the “Australian Dream” – the idea that hard work guarantees the reward of home ownership – has already been broken. They argue they have been locked out of the same opportunities their parents took for granted, and hope the reforms will rebalance a housing market tilted heavily in favor of wealthy investors. But critics warn the changes could choke off the very investment the country needs to build much-needed new housing, push rental prices even higher for already struggling tenants, and unfairly erode the life savings of ordinary Australians who built wealth through property investment.

Australia is now home to some of the least affordable major cities on the planet. Today, the average Australian property costs nearly 10 times the median annual household income – a four-fold increase from where it stood 25 years ago. Over that same period, national average rental prices have doubled. The root of the crisis is a simple supply and demand imbalance: Australia does not have nearly enough housing to accommodate its fast-growing population. Decades of underinvestment in public social housing, chronically slow residential construction, and restrictive zoning laws that block new development in high-demand urban areas have all combined to create the current crunch.

But many analysts argue that generous tax breaks for property investors have significantly exacerbated the problem. The two most high-profile policies at the center of the debate are negative gearing, which allows investment property owners to deduct any losses from their taxable income, and the 50% capital gains tax (CGT) discount, which halves the tax owed on profits from selling an investment property. Together, these policies have turned residential housing into an extremely attractive speculative asset, incentivizing mass buying and selling of properties for profit rather than for use as homes. Analysts note these policies were rolled out at the turn of the millennium, marking a clear turning point after which house prices began to outpace wage growth permanently.

These tax arrangements remain fiercely defended by existing homeowners, who benefit from rising property values that grow their personal wealth, as well as investor groups and real estate industry bodies that argue changes will cut into profits and disrupt the market’s ability to deliver new supply. The group bearing the worst of the crisis is young people, who are caught in a vicious cycle: saving for ever-larger down payments while paying soaring rents, only to face decades of large mortgage repayments on smaller properties located far from city center job markets.

Sebastian’s parents had long harbored quiet concerns about their children’s future housing prospects, but were shocked to learn the issue was already weighing on their 13-year-old son’s mind. “The first thought I had was you shouldn’t have to worry about this – you should be worrying about homework, friends, school,” Sebastian’s father Ed told the BBC. “The second was: you don’t have to just accept this.”

Together, the pair turned their anxiety into action: they built a website publishing Sebastian’s calculations and launched a public petition calling for reform to the CGT discount and negative gearing, which has now collected thousands of signatures from supporters across the country. “We hope this would remove the incentive to use houses as investments and bring houses back to being places to live,” Sebastian says.

This is not the first time Australian federal politicians have pushed for these changes. The center-left Labor Party, which now forms government, first proposed reforms to negative gearing and CGT in the 2016 and 2019 federal elections. It lost both campaigns, with many political analysts blaming the housing reform proposals for the defeat. But much has changed since 2019: the housing crisis has deepened dramatically, pushing its impact up into the middle class, while demographic shifts have put younger, disenfranchised millennial and Generation Z voters in a much larger share of the national electorate. Many older voters are also now seeing the crisis impact their own children and grandchildren, shifting their views on the need for change.

“It’s like a slow-boiling frog – this has been building for more than 20 years, but it has now hit crisis point,” Danielle Wood, chair of the Productivity Commission, the Australian government’s independent economic advisory body, told the BBC. “And I think these tax changes have probably become a bit symbolic in thinking about what’s created this problem.”

For older Australians who have already built property wealth, many see the proposed reforms as an unfair political attack. Retired Melbourne couple Christine and Cliff Hill, who own their own home plus three investment properties, reject the complaints from younger generations. Cliff, 64, says he and his wife were able to afford their first home by making sacrifices: moving to an outer suburb, cutting every unnecessary expense, and skipping luxury holidays. “You can’t go complaining that houses are $1m because they aren’t. They’re $500,000 or $600,000 but the young folks don’t want to live 35km from Melbourne,” he says. The couple profited heavily from the current tax system when they sold a fourth investment property last year, earning a $348,000 profit they would have paid half the tax on under existing rules. They argue the government’s reforms will lead to disaster: investors will either raise rents or sell off their properties, and even if there is a temporary bump in supply, long-term demand will still outstrip supply, leaving homes just as unaffordable for first-time buyers.

“The government are going after the inter-generational gap that they keep talking about – and being a baby boomer, I’m really over that,” Christine says.

But the current Labor government believes public opinion has shifted enough to make reform politically viable this time around. One early indicator of shifting public attitudes came in 2024, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese faced widespread public backlash over his purchase of a multi-million-dollar clifftop holiday home amid the worsening affordability crisis. In its first budget following its landmark 2025 election win, passed as public anger over inaction on housing boosted support for minor progressive parties, the government outlined its planned changes: it will replace the fixed 50% CGT discount with an inflation-adjusted markdown, and restrict negative gearing tax benefits to newly constructed properties only.

Crucially, the changes will be grandfathered, meaning they will only apply to investment properties purchased after the budget passes; existing investors will keep their current tax benefits permanently. Even supporters of the reforms, however, acknowledge the tax changes alone will not solve the crisis. Experts warn the reforms will do little to address the core issue: the national shortage of housing supply. The tax changes are projected to cause a small drop in property prices and free up more market space for first-time buyers by reducing investor competition, but they are not a silver bullet.

“They’re not a panacea on house prices,” Wood says. Critics on the right have increasingly shifted blame for the crisis to Australia’s high migration intake, with the conservative Coalition opposition and right-wing populist party One Nation both calling for deep cuts to migration to reduce housing demand. While migration does contribute to population growth, experts say it is a minor factor in the supply shortage, and economists warn cutting migration would have severe negative knock-on effects for Australia’s labor force and overall economy.

Wood says the real solution is far simpler: “We just need to make it easier and faster to build.” While construction regulation is necessary to protect public safety, the current system requires dozens of overlapping approvals and layers of bureaucracy that have slowed average build times by 40% over the past 15 years.

For Sebastian, the tax reforms feel like a small step in the right direction, but he remains deeply skeptical that policymakers truly have the interests of young people at heart. Many sitting politicians own investment properties themselves, and he argues the grandfathering clause was explicitly designed to protect their own wealth. “Young people, they feel let down… disappointed in policymakers for allowing this to happen. And they also feel just sad that the ‘Australian Dream’ of owning a house is unattainable for them.”