What drives modern protected area establishment in Australia?

Protected areas are a fundamental mechanism for ensuring the persistence of biodiversity. The strategic policy objectives set by governments for protected area land acquisition are strong determinants of biodiversity outcomes. An examination of these objectives is necessary to determine those most influential in designing protected area networks and understand why Australia's extinction rates exceed those elsewhere despite actively establishing protected areas over the past several decades. To examine spatio-temporal trends in policy objectives for protected areas, we evaluated the strategic priorities in Federal, State, and Territory policy documents across Australia between 1992 and 2019 using thematic analysis. We classified priorities into seven themes: adequacy, Indigenous and cultural values; representation of ecosystem and species types; threatened species and their habitat; social and recreational values; unique values and avoiding threatening processes. We found that the representation of ecosystem and species types was the most prevalent theme in policy documents, and the least common theme was social and recreational values. We posit several reasons for this trend and warn that emphasizing extent, in terms of area or representativeness, may diminish the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact for biodiversity outcomes. We found that policies were generally supportive of the strategic identification of particular species or communities that would quantifiably benefit from protection (referred to as avoided loss). Risked-based approaches to the establishment of protected areas are supported by modern conservation literature to enhance the protected area network's effectiveness. To maximize limited resources, we recommend that governments continue encouraging urgency to avoid species and habitat loss in their strategic priorities. This urgency should be accompanied by clear and consistent funding for on-the-ground actions which facilitate the socio-ecological outcomes that characterize modern protected area policy