Lord Mayor Robert Doyle has suggested Melbourne's police on the beat should carry assault rifles.
Mr Doyle said it was "not a look I'd particularly enjoy our streets", but after an explosion killed 22 people leaving a pop concert in Manchester, he said Melbourne's general duties officers might need to carry assault weapons.
"I'll throw this one out there - I hope I don't put the Chief Commissioner on the spot here - do we need to think about arming our police, our frontline police, with long-arms?" he told 3AW.
Presenter Neil Mitchell appeared surprised at the proposal. '"You can't have a bloke on point duty or walking down the beat carrying one," he contended.
"Well, yes you can," Mr Doyle responded.
"I'm not suggesting that we should; I'm saying we should ask the question...We have to ask questions and say to our police, do you have all you need in a changing world where the threat is probable?"
In Paris, police were given new assault rifles after 130 people were killed and hundreds injured when jihadist gunmen armed with Kalashnikovs and suicide bombs attacked a concert hall, restaurants and cafes in the city in November 2015.
Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton agreed it was not a practical option for police on the beat in Victoria.
"We always are looking at options around these things and currently we think keeping them in our specialist units for us is a better way to go. We can quickly deploy our specialist units and our specialist capability. They have long-arms and they practice with long-arms all the time," Mr Ashton told Fairfax Media.
"Issuing them to our general duties is a big step."
He said they could look at providing additional ammunition to police instead.
In the Paris attack, a member of the BAC - France's anti-criminal police unit - was first on scene at the Bataclan concert hall. He shot dead one of the jihadists, but was forced to retreat and wait for tactical officers because he wasn't equipped sufficiently against the two still alive.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced last year all BAC officers would carry similar firearms as the country's tactical forces and every police patrol unit would be equipped with German automatic rifle, HK G36.
It comes as NSW Police consider giving its general duties access to M4-style semiautomatic weapons as part of the response to the Lindt cafe siege.
Responding to the coroner's findings into the police handling of the Lindt siege, Commissioner Mick Fuller confirmed to Sky News the force was reviewing its use of long arms and flagged a potential expansion of the rifle to general duties police.
Mr Ashton said it was an option Victoria Police had looked at too.
"At the moment, it doesn't look like the path we're going down," he said.
But like NSW, Victoria Police have undergone a shift in tactics following the Lindt siege. The force has moved away from the traditional 'cordon, contain and negotiate' to training police who are first on scene to be prepared to immediately engage armed terrorists or mass shooters in order to reduce the number of lives lost.
Local and international terror events have shown terrorists may pretend to negotiate in order to maximise publicity but intend to kill as many hostages and police as possible before dying in the final shoot-out.
NSW police were operating under the 'cordon and contain' philosophy when gunman Man Haron Monis took eight cafe staff members and 10 customers hostage for 16 hours in a cafe on December 15, 2014.
Coroner Michael Barnes found police waited too long to enter the Lindt cafe stronghold.
He stressed the deaths of hostages Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson were not the fault of police and commended the bravery of the officers who entered the cafe despite believing Monis had explosives.
"All of the blame for those rests on the shoulders of Man Monis. He created the intensely dangerous situation. He maliciously executed Tori Johnson. He barricaded himself into a corner of the cafe and his actions forced police to enter the cafe in circumstances where the risk of hostages being wounded or killed was very high," Mr Barnes found.