Tony Abbott will discuss how to secure Turkey’s borders to stop the flow of extremist fighters into Syria when he meets the country’s leaders this week.
Abbott is due to mark Saturday’s centenary of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli alongside the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the New Zealand prime minister, John Key.
He will hold sideline meetings to discuss what can be done to stop foreign fighters from using Turkey as a transit point for joining Isis.
“I will be talking to the Turkish leadership about what can be done to better police that border and to better ensure that people who have no reason to be going there are prevented from being there,” Abbott said in New Zealand on Monday.
“It is absolutely critical that as far as humanly possible, we stop gullible, impressionable young Australians from going to places where they could very easily be killed or they could get caught up in something which is in no one’s interests.”
Abbott was in Wellington on Monday for the unveiling of a memorial to Australian soldiers in New Zealand’s national war memorial.
He acknowledged that the Anzac centenary presented a heightened security risk for authorities.
“At Anzac events in Australia over the next few days there will be a visible security presence, and on the Gallipoli peninsula there will be a strong security presence organised by the Turkish government,” Abbott said.
But he encouraged people not to avoid attending commemoration ceremonies.
“The best thing Australians and New Zealanders can do is to turn up in very large numbers at Anzac events, wherever they are, to support our values, our interests and our armed forces,” Abbott said.
About 8,000 Australians received passes in a ballot to attend the official dawn service in Turkey on Anzac Day, but thousands are expected to travel to Gallipoli before and after the event.
Hundreds of official ceremonies will take place across Australia and New Zealand.
Raids in Melbourne at the weekend that resulted in one man being charged and another held in preventive detention proved that police were working effectively to stamp out the threat of terrorism, Abbott said.
“Yes, we had some arrests in Melbourne over the weekend of people who were planning a terrorist event to coincide with Anzac, but the fact that this particular plot was interdicted as it was shows that our security agencies are working very effectively,” he said. “We have the best police and security agencies in the world. You need them at times like this.”
The acting chief commissioner of Victoria police, Tim Cartwright, alleged on Monday that one of the young men arrested in the raids had links with international terrorism groups.
“What we have seen is that they are motivated by Islamic State,” he told ABC TV.
