Australia is in a better position to avoid a large-scale, Paris-style terrorist attack because of the country’s comprehensive gun laws, the justice minister, Michael Keenan, has said.
Keenan told ABC radio on Tuesday that the government “can’t discount the possibility” of a terrorist attack, similar to the deadly attacks in the Paris capital earlier this month, on Australian soil.
But, he argued, a number of factors give Australia “some natural advantages that unfortunately European countries don’t have at the moment”.
One of those advantages was Australia’s strict gun-control laws, enacted after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, Keenan said.
“The robust gun control that we’ve had in Australia for the past 20 years would mean that it would be very difficult to get your hands on those sort of high-powered weapons that we saw used in those Paris attacks,” Keenan said.
In June, then prime minister Tony Abbott had warned that the terror threat had changed, as Isis shifted tactics.
“As we know the [Isis] death cult is regularly admonishing its supporters and sympathisers around the world to kill – that is what it is doing,” he said. “Regrettably … all you need for terrorism these days is a knife, a flag, a camera phone and a victim. This is the grim reality that the world faces now.”
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is due to give an address to the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon, outlining the government’s response to the terrorism threat, following on from a similar address given by Abbott in February.
Keenan on Tuesday praised Australia’s tough border control measures and strong sense of social cohesion as other reasons that Australia is better placed than European countries to avoid mass terrorism events.
“At the moment they’ve got great security vulnerabilities in the fact they’ve got hundreds of thousands of people moving around in a completely uncontrolled way,” said the justice minister.
“Our community relations here are as good as anywhere in the world and we’ve made an enormous effort to work with the Muslim community in Australia, to make sure that they are our partners in addressing this challenge,” he said. “So look …there’s natural advantages that we have here.”
A Newspoll published on Monday found that three out of four Australians believe a large-scale terror attack is likely on home soil, and one in four believe it is inevitable.
