Canberra Agencies Rush to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Government Websites This Week

At least a dozen ACT government and Commonwealth agency websites were found this week to be serving duplicate, mislabelled or replaced images across key public-facing pages, triggering an internal review by the Digital Transformation Agency and prompting the ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate to issue internal guidance to its web teams on Friday.

The problem matters now because federal agencies across Canberra are mid-cycle on a broader digital accessibility overhaul tied to the Commonwealth's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy, which has a compliance checkpoint in September 2026. Duplicate images — particularly those with conflicting or missing alt-text — directly undermine that compliance work, and remediating them late in the cycle is significantly more expensive than catching them during content audits.

Where the Problems Have Appeared

Services Australia's Tuggeranong and Belconnen service centre pages were among the sites identified as carrying outdated imagery from a 2023 content migration, with some photos duplicated across multiple department sub-pages while others linked to broken asset paths. The ACT Health website, hosted under the health.act.gov.au domain, had a cluster of duplicate banner images on pages related to the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children at Garran — images that had been uploaded twice during a January 2026 content refresh and never deduplicated in the Squiz Matrix content management system the territory government uses.

The Australian National University's research communications team flagged a related issue on the ANU College of Health and Medicine's public site, where image replacement scripts used during a February redesign had left ghost files in the media library, inflating page load times and generating duplicate metadata entries. ANU sits outside ACT government jurisdiction but operates under similar Commonwealth accessibility expectations given its status as a self-accrediting institution under the Higher Education Support Act.

The University of Canberra's Bruce campus communications office confirmed it conducted its own internal audit this week after becoming aware of the broader issue, checking approximately 400 pages in its institutional CMS for duplicate asset entries.

What Triggered the Review

The immediate trigger appears to have been a procurement document circulated late last month. The Digital Transformation Agency published updated guidance on 27 June 2026 as part of its ongoing Whole of Government Hosting Framework work, which explicitly flagged duplicate media assets as a contributor to bloated storage costs and accessibility non-compliance. That document noted agencies were collectively storing an estimated 40 percent more image data than required due to poor deduplication practices — though that figure applied to the Commonwealth hosting environment broadly, not to Canberra agencies specifically.

The cost implications are real. Cloud storage for government-hosted media assets is billed against departmental ICT budgets, and a duplicate image problem across dozens of sites compounds quickly. Agencies operating out of the Canberra CBD precinct around London Circuit and Edinburgh Avenue — where several Commonwealth departments cluster their web operations staff — have been working through remediation checklists since Wednesday.

For ACT government sites, the guidance issued Friday recommended teams run deduplication checks using their existing Squiz Matrix tooling before the end of the financial quarter, and to cross-reference image alt-text against WCAG 2.2 Level AA requirements ahead of the September accessibility checkpoint.

For Canberrans who interact with these sites — whether booking appointments at a Gungahlin Access Canberra service centre or checking clinical services information through ACT Health — the practical impact has been mostly invisible so far: slower page loads in some cases, and occasional broken image icons on older browser versions. The remediation work is largely backend and should not require public-facing downtime. Teams have been advised to complete primary deduplication passes by 18 July 2026, with a secondary audit scheduled for late August before the accessibility deadline hits.