Control orders on teens as young as 14 are needed to combat the increasing terror threat coming from younger people who can potentially take only hours to hatch a plot, police say.
Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin said control orders on young teens would be used judiciously.
In the 10 years since control orders have been available they've been used just six times, four of those recently, he said.
New legislation, tabled in parliament by Attorney-General George Brandis on Thursday, allows control orders to be applied to those as young as 14.
Mr Colvin said the counter-terrorism environment had changed significantly in the past year and police needed the tools and legislation to keep pace.
He said terror threats had gone low-tech with less sophistication but more speed from idea to intent.
"Sometimes we are talking hours, if we are lucky we are talking days," the commissioner said.
Compliance would be routinely monitored through phone taps and surveillance without any requirement for suspicion of a breach.
As a separate measure, principally aimed at anti-Semitic conduct, the legislation creates a new offence of advocating genocide.
Senator Brandis said since the terror alert level was raised to high in September 2014 there had been three attacks, with 26 people charged in relation to 10 counter-terrorism operations.
Children as young as 14 had been involved in terrorism-related activities, he said.
Control orders fall a step short of arrest and are intended to disrupt terrorist activity.
Imposed only by a court, they can stipulate that a person not associate or communicate with certain other people, stay away from certain locations, not use technology such as the internet, wear a tracking device or report regularly to police.
The parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security has announced it will conduct an inquiry into provisions of the new legislation and report back to parliament by February 15.
Federal MPs have also begun debating legislation to strip dual national terrorism suspects of citizenship.
With Labor giving its backing, its passage through parliament is assured.
The laws would likely affect just a few dozen dual nationals.
It stipulates that dual nationals would only lose citizenship if they engaged in terrorism conduct offshore or if they fled Australia after committing a terror act.
The Greens accused Labor of being in "zombie lockstep" with the government.
"This bill is not going to address the social exclusion that leads to radicalisation and may even prove counter-productive in the long term," Greens senator Nick McKim said.
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