Australia is facing a biodiversity crisis, with marked declines in the extent and condition of many native ecosystems, increases in the number of listed threatened species, and forecasts that significant numbers of native species could go extinct in the coming decades, beyond the more than 100 endemic species that have gone extinct since colonisation (Woinarski et al., 2019; Murphy and van Leeuwen, 2021). The crisis in outcomes is a product of a failure of federal, state and local biodiversity policy. The nation’s primary environmental protection legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) (EPBC Act), has been found to be environmentally ineffective, or have considerable scope for improvement, in numerous government and independent reviews since the late 2000s (Australian National Audit Office, 2003, 2014, 2020; Macintosh, 2004, 2009; Macintosh and Wilkinson, 2005; Hawke, 2009; Milder et al., 2015; Ward et al., 2019; Samuel, 2020). Similar findings have been made on the operation of state regulatory frameworks (Fowler, 1986; Bartel, 2003; New South Wales Auditor General, 2006; Macintosh, 2012; Simmons et al., 2018; Evans et al., 2019; Audit Office of New South Wales, 2022). At the same time, public investment in biodiversity conservation is widely considered to be inadequate (Samuel, 2020; Ritchie, 2022).