Prime Minister Tony Abbott has refused to change his favoured name for terror group the Islamic State, despite an expert’s warning that it may perpetuate the group’s own propaganda.

On Friday morning, Mr Abbott told radio station 3AW he would continue calling the group a “death cult” because he believed the term to be accurate, even going so far as to add the descriptor “wretched”.

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“I’m certainly not going to call it Islamic State because it’s a perversion of religion and a travesty of a state,” he told host Neil Mitchell.

“It is a death cult in that the people who join it are in love with death.

“We should call things what they are.

“It is never right to kill in the name of god, which is all this wretched death cult does.”

The Prime Minister was responding to the comments of deradicalisation expert Abdul-Rehman Malik, who warned on Thursday that the term ‘death cult’ was potentially harmful.

“I think to call [Islamic State] a death cult, as the Australian Prime Minister does, is a complete misnomer and it actually feeds in to IS propaganda,” Mr Malik told the ABC.

“The propagandists of the Islamic State, when they hear themselves referred to as a death cult hell bent on global domination, are patting themselves on the back because you know what?

“You’ve bought in to their narrative.”

Other members of Mr Abbott’s cabinet prefer the term Daesh, a derogatory term widely used by the Islamic State’s opponents in the Middle East.