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

At least a dozen ACT government and Commonwealth agency websites carried duplicate, mismatched or broken image files this week, triggering an unscheduled remediation effort across Canberra's sprawling public sector digital estate. The problem — long treated as a low-priority housekeeping task — surfaced publicly after Service NSW's shared platform infrastructure pushed a content syndication update on Monday that exposed similar latent errors sitting inside ACT Digital's own content management environment.

The timing is awkward. The ACT government is mid-way through a $4.2 million overhaul of its service portal, a project anchored at the Dickson-based Service ACT shopfront and managed centrally from the Canberra Nara Centre on London Circuit. Duplicate image assets slow page-load times, create accessibility failures under WCAG 2.1 standards, and can break the alt-text tagging that screen readers depend on — a compliance issue with direct legal exposure under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.

What Happened This Week

The trigger appears to have been a bulk content migration carried out between June 30 and July 1, when web teams moved legacy pages into a new Drupal 10 environment. Multiple agencies — including the ACT Environment Directorate and the Australian National University's public-facing research portal — reported images appearing twice on the same page, or thumbnail previews linking to the wrong high-resolution file. ANU's Research School of Computer Science flagged the issue internally on Tuesday, noting that the university's open-access publication pages on Acton campus were serving duplicate banner images sourced from a redundant media library that should have been archived in March.

The Commonwealth side of the problem centres on a shared image CDN — content delivery network — used by several agencies with offices in the Barton and Parkes precincts. According to a technical advisory circulated within the Digital Transformation Agency on Wednesday, the root cause is a naming-collision bug introduced when automated image-optimisation scripts failed to check for existing file hashes before uploading resized versions. The DTA advisory, which The Daily Canberra has seen, sets a remediation deadline of July 11.

For everyday Canberrans trying to use government services, the practical effect has ranged from mildly annoying to genuinely obstructive. The Access Canberra website — used by residents in growth suburbs like Gungahlin and Belconnen to book services, pay rates and check planning applications — showed duplicate map thumbnails on its development application search pages for at least 36 hours before the error was corrected late Thursday. Residents lodging DA inquiries for new builds along Gungahlin Drive reported confusion when property boundary images appeared to show two different parcels simultaneously.

What Comes Next for Affected Users

The DTA's July 11 deadline applies only to Commonwealth-hosted assets. The ACT government is working to its own schedule: Service ACT has committed to completing an image-library audit across all 47 subsites within its digital ecosystem by July 18, according to a project status note published on the ACT Digital website Friday morning. That audit will use automated duplicate-detection tooling — a process that, on comparable state government projects in Victoria in 2024, typically surfaces between 8 and 15 percent of stored image files as redundant or duplicated.

For public servants and Canberra residents who rely on these platforms, the practical advice is straightforward. If an ACT government page is showing garbled or doubled images, the Service ACT contact centre on 13 22 81 is logging fault reports and can escalate to the web team. ANU students and researchers experiencing issues on the university's digital platforms should contact IT Service Desk at the Chifley Library building on the Acton campus directly rather than waiting for a system-wide fix.

The episode has reignited a longer-running debate inside the ACT public service about whether the Territory's digital infrastructure investment is keeping pace with growth. Canberra's public sector workforce has absorbed roughly 8,000 additional Commonwealth positions since 2022, each generating new content, new documents and new image assets flowing into systems that were not always designed to handle the volume. The duplicate image crisis is minor in isolation. As a symptom, it points to something larger.