Australia’s airports have sufficient security in the
wake of the deadly attack in Brussels, despite a planned strike by immigration
workers ahead of the busy Easter holiday weekend, Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull says.

The self-declared Islamic State militant group has
claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attacks at Brussels airport and on a
rush-hour metro train in the Belgian capital on Tuesday which killed at least
30 people.

Australia is on heightened alert for attacks by
home-grown radicals, but the threat level has not been raised following the
Brussels attacks and Turnbull said the country was in a better position than
Europe.

“I can assure Australians that our security system,
our border protection, our domestic security arrangements, are much stronger
than they are in Europe, where regrettably they allowed them to slip,”
Turnbull said on Australian Broadcasting Corp television.

“That weakness in European security is not
unrelated to the problems they’ve been having in recent times.”

Turnbull, who described the Brussels attacks as
“cowardly”, said he would hold further meetings with security
officials today to discuss the Brussels attack but initial guidance indicated
that “the threat level is at an appropriate level.”

Turnbull said that the Australian Federal Police
presence at airports would not be compromised by a strike.

Easter is a peak travel time at both domestic and
international airports in Australia. Immigration and Border Protection workers
plan to walk off the job on Thursday, hoping to end a two-year contract dispute
between public sector workers and the federal government.

– with Reuters