New anti-terrorism laws would not turn Australia into a police state, Prime Minister John Howard said.
Howard proposed beefing up Australia's anti-terrorism laws after he met British counterpart Tony Blair in London last week to include making it a criminal offence to train in terrorist techniques abroad.
"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 Channel Ten television from London.
"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," he said.
Howard and Blair met as London's transport system was hit by bombers for the second time in a fortnight. No one was killed in the latest attacks, two weeks after 56 people died in blasts on the British capital's train and bus network.
State leaders backed Howard's plans, which include laws to make it illegal to attend Islamic schools overseas which teach hatred and bomb-making, in an effort to protect major cities like Sydney and Melbourne.
But civil libertarians expressed concern that innocent people might be caught up by laws that were ill-defined and hard to enforce. On Sunday, British police hunting the London bombers admitted that they had killed a Brazilian electrician by mistake.
Howard said he would meet state leaders to discuss other new security measures, including increased use of closed circuit television, which he said had been invaluable in the search for the London bombers, at transport hubs and in major cities.
Australia, which sent troops to join key ally the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, has never been hit by a major peacetime attack on home soil but has steadily built up security since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
After the September 11 attacks, Australia gave police and intelligence agencies more power to detain and question suspects or people suspected of knowing about future attacks.
Eighty-eight Australians were among 202 people killed in nightclub bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002 and the Australian embassy in Jakarta was hit by a 2004 suicide bomb.
