ACT Government's Digital Records Overhaul Hits Snag Over Duplicate Image Problem

A duplicate image problem embedded in the ACT Government's digital records modernisation program came to a head this week, with multiple territory agencies discovering that automated scanning systems had created redundant copies of thousands of archived documents — in some cases storing the same file four or five times across shared servers.

The issue surfaced publicly through routine disclosures tied to the territory's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, a framework that has guided the transition of paper records across government directorates into centralised electronic storage. With that program now past its midpoint, auditors reviewing progress flagged the duplication problem as a material inefficiency — one that is consuming storage capacity faster than originally budgeted and complicating retrieval for public servants who rely on the system daily.

Why It Matters Now

The timing is awkward. The ACT Government committed to completing the bulk of its records digitisation work before the end of the current financial year, meaning agencies were under pressure to push large volumes of material through scanners quickly. Speed, it appears, came at a cost. The duplication problem is not unique to Canberra — state governments in Victoria and Queensland have encountered similar issues during comparable programs — but the concentration of federal and territory public servants in the capital means the downstream effects are particularly acute here.

Directorates including the ACT Education Directorate, based on Maitland Street in Belconnen, and the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, which operates out of facilities near Civic, are among those understood to be working through their own file inventories to identify and remove redundant records. Neither directorate had issued a formal public statement on the matter as of Saturday morning.

At the Australian National University's Chifley Library on the Acton campus, archivists who have been collaborating with the territory on a separate oral history digitisation project flagged a related concern in late June: duplicate audio files were appearing in shared catalogues, creating confusion for researchers accessing collections remotely. The university runs its own deduplication software, but the shared territory-facing portions of the project are subject to the government's own systems.

The Numbers Behind the Problem

Storage is not cheap. Enterprise-grade government cloud storage in Australia currently runs at roughly $80 to $120 per terabyte per month depending on the contract tier, and the ACT Government's whole-of-government storage footprint has grown substantially since 2023. If even 15 percent of stored records are duplicates — a conservative figure cited in comparable audits in other jurisdictions — the financial waste across a multi-terabyte archive adds up quickly on an annualised basis.

The broader Digital Strategy 2025–2028 program has a published budget allocation, but specific figures for the records digitisation stream have not been broken out in any public document reviewed by The Daily Canberra. What is clear from territory budget papers tabled in May is that the Chief Digital Officer's office received additional supplementary funding in the 2025–26 supplementary appropriation — a signal that the program was running over its original resource estimates.

Specialist firms offering deduplication and records management services have been circulating proposals to ACT Government procurement contacts in recent weeks, according to tender activity visible on the ACT Government's Tenders ACT portal. At least two expressions of interest for records remediation services were posted in June, with closing dates falling this coming week.

For public servants working out of offices in Gungahlin or the Brindabella Business Park near the airport — where many ACT and Commonwealth agencies lease space — the practical effect has been slower retrieval times when accessing centralised file systems, particularly for records created before 2020 that were scanned in the earlier phases of the program.

The Chief Digital Officer's office is expected to publish an update to the Digital Strategy implementation report before the end of July. Agencies have been advised internally to hold off on new large-scale scanning batches until deduplication protocols are clarified. Public servants needing urgent access to affected records have been directed to contact their directorate's records management teams directly — a manual workaround that, for now, is the most reliable path through the backlog.