During the two years of his prime ministership, Tony Abbott's immigration rhetoric had a constant refrain of 'stop the boats'. From his public utterances it is not clear that Mr Abbott has any firm and unchanging views on economic immigration provided that the immigrants arrive by plane. For his two-year incumbency, this paper reviews the areas of immigration numbers; 457 and other temporary visas; refugees and asylum seekers; and trends in the views of the Australian public on immigration. It also examines some of the claimed economic impacts of immigration and the role of free trade agreements in deregulating in-flows as well as the immigration reports of the Productivity Commission. Finally, it scrutinises Abbott's changing views on multiculturalism contrasting them with those of his successor Malcolm Turnbull.

Australia is a rich country, which, if it is to be seen as meeting the cosmopolitan criteria for a good international citizen, has a responsibility to assist the poorer countries of the world. Each new federal government looks to the aid program to imprint its own ideology and judges whether aid funding is in the light of overall national needs. The Abbott Government is party to this revisionism. AusAID has been abolished, incorporated within the Department of Foreign Affairs; the aid budget has been slashed with new geographical and sectoral foci introduced alongside a heavy stress on the national interest. Aid for trade and economic policy conditionality are back in fashion. Yet much of the Abbott Government's allegedly new framework represents a return to the concerns of earlier Coalition governments. Regrettably, this change to a less cosmopolitan and more selfish Australia has attracted very little public concern or debate.

All over the world, there is now a rising tide of radical ‘Islamist’ movements, which, especially since 9/11, have turned militant. Since then, terrorist attacks against civilian populations both in the West and within Muslim countries themselves have become almost daily occurrences. Several countries have been directly or indirectly affected by Islamist militancy. In Bangladesh, Islamist militants killed 156 people in the 1990s, and the country experienced at least 48 smallscale attacks that killed over 120 people between 2015 and 2016. The July 2016 attack at the Holey Artisan Café in Dhaka killed approximately 20 foreigners, while an abortive attack six days later killed two. These and other similar incidents confirmed the presence of external militant outfits in the country and the severity of the challenge. Based on an exhaustive review of the relevant literature and two stints of fieldwork in Bangladesh involving 71 in-depth interviews of highly credentialled individuals, this project seek to investigate not only the causes of radicalization but also how radicalization has unfolded since 2009. This thesis looks at both local and global factors that have served to provoke young Bangladeshis, many of whom are from relatively well-educated backgrounds, to become religiously belligerent and eventually to turn into terrorists. Ideology, it is argued, plays a pivotal role in the radicalization process and justifies violence. Most importantly, ideology proffers solutions to the micro and macro causes of commonly identifiable youth disaffection. This study mainly focuses on the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s exploitation of religious beliefs and their construction of a mobilising, apocalyptic narrative that strikes a chord with the young, middle-class Muslims. Both organisations target them for recruitment. The thesis ends by proffering what is called a Pyramid Root Cause model,’ which attempts to tie all the causative variables of radicalization into a connected explanation of what has been happening in Bangladesh over the last decade.