Australia will not become a "police state" Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday in response to concerns that proposed laws designed to stop radical preaching will undermine basic freedoms.
"You have an obligation to the public to take whatever measures are reasonable and proper to protect the community and that is what I'm sure the overwhelming majority of Australians feel," Howard told the Ten Network.
"And they can rest assured, and they know that, no government is going to turn Australia into a police state in order to protect us against terrorists, we don't need to do that."
Howard, who met victims of the London transport bombings at hospital while visiting Britain, said the government would do whatever it could to prevent a terror attack on home soil.
The prime minister has indicated that the government will consider adopting Britain's tough new anti-terror laws and make indirect incitement to violence an offense.
Speaking from Britain, Howard criticized comments made by some Muslim religious leaders in the wake of the London transport bombings which killed 56 people and injured 700 others.
"I make no bones about saying it, when I hear one of the imams in Melbourne saying that in effect [Osama] bin Laden is a good man and that the attacks in London were the responsibility of the Americans, I mean I think that is an appalling thing," he said.
Meanwhile a radical Islamic group, which is outlawed in British universities and elsewhere, reportedly has been recruiting Muslim youth in Sydney. Hizb ut-Tahrir, also known as the Party of Islamic Liberation, has been distributing material near Sydney mosques saying "the war on Islam is reignited," the Sun-Herald reported.
The report said the group described suicide bombers as martyrs and advocated the destruction of Western ideals.
But group spokesman Wassim Doureihi said the group condemned violence.
"We only work for intellectual and political means," he said.
Justice Minister Chris Ellison said action needed to be taken against radical groups that incited violence and that the government was considering new laws to expand the definition of inciting terrorism.
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