Barrister Greg Barns says the proposed police powers to hold terrorism suspects for four days without access to a court and potentially without even seeing a lawyer are wide open to abuse.

The powers are one of 16 recommendations made by an expert panel on the state's anti-terrorism laws, which also include giving individual officers the certainty they can shoot-to-kill to stop a terrorist attack.

Police will also be able to declare "special areas", a power that currently rests solely with the Premier, allowing them to stop and search people and cars and houses without a warrant.

The extraordinary detention-without-trial proposals have not yet been finalised but the review panel of former police commissioner Ken Lay and former Supreme Court of Appeal justice David Harper also wants police to be able to question suspects while they are being held, a power that does not currently exist.

It is unclear if the final legislative changes would prohibit a suspect's access to a lawyer while they are being grilled.

Changes to bail and parole laws are also recommended to include a presumption against bail for accused facing terrorism.

A second report, dealing with "whole-of-justice system" issues will be made public within weeks, Premier Daniel Andrews said.

Commissioner Graham Ashton said the "special area" provisions were an "extraordinary power that we use in the exceptional circumstances of a terrorist event, where we declare a geographical area and inside that area we can prevent entry and exit from that area."

"It's also got powers without a warrant of searching premises, cars, people."

Mr Ashton said he wanted his officers to be confident they were acting lawfully if they had to gun down a terrorist engaged in an attack.

"In this day-and-age, there is a need to act quickly," he said,

"Seconds count and we're much more likely to need to shoot first.

"The current laws has shown in cases that we have been covered but there's this doubt in the minds of officers around shooting first rather than shooting second and these days when we're looking at active shooter situations ... we need as much clarity as we can get when confronting an armed offender."

But Mr Barns, who is a criminal barrister and a spokesman for the Australian Lawyers Alliance, described the Andrews government's proposals as "extremely dangerous".

"The detention without trial proposal ... leaves open the possibility of severe abuse such as sleep deprivation, long interrogations and isolation from family," the barrister said.

"Anywhere where these powers exist, those are the sort of abuses that routinely occur."

Mr Barns said stop-and-search powers in France had led to the routine harassment and racial profiling of young Muslim men and their families.

"Governments and their advisors say that terrorism will never beat us but yet again, we see a goss diminution of human rights being proposed, the rule of law being trashed," he said.

"We are allowing the tthreat of terrorism to pull apart those key aspects of democracy."