How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and Why It Took Years to Fix

Federal and ACT government agencies are quietly working through a significant digital infrastructure problem: thousands of duplicate image files embedded across official websites, intranets, and public-facing digital services. The cleanup, which involves systematic duplicate image replacement programs across multiple agencies, has become one of the more unglamorous but consequential IT projects running in Canberra right now.

The issue matters because it is not simply a storage headache. Redundant image files slow page-load times, create version-control nightmares, inflate content management costs, and — critically for government — make accessibility compliance far harder to achieve. When the same image exists under dozens of different filenames, attaching accurate alt-text descriptions to every instance becomes a manual task of extraordinary scale.

How the Problem Built Up Over Twenty Years

The root cause is straightforward: government websites grew in an era before centralised digital asset management was standard practice. Agencies such as Services Australia, whose national operations hub sits on Callam Street in Woden, and the Department of Finance on Kings Avenue, Barton, each ran their own content teams. When staff needed an image — a stock photo of a Centrelink office, a headshot from a ministerial release, a chart from a budget paper — they uploaded it directly to whichever content management system was in front of them. No one checked whether the file already existed elsewhere on the same domain.

The ACT government faced the same structural problem on a smaller but still significant scale. The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, which oversees the ACT Government website hosted at act.gov.au, has been migrating legacy content since at least 2021 as part of its Digital Canberra strategy. Every migration wave surfaced new layers of duplication. Pages originally built in the early 2000s for Tuggeranong Community Council notices or Gungahlin development approvals had been copied and re-uploaded repeatedly over years of platform changes.

The Australian National University Library's digital scholarship team, based on the Acton campus, documented a related phenomenon in its own institutional repository in 2023: a single archival photograph of Civic's Garema Place from the 1970s was found stored under more than 30 separate filenames across the library's digital systems, each uploaded at different resolutions by different staff members over nearly two decades.

The Technical and Compliance Pressure That Forced Action

Two converging pressures brought the issue to a head. First, the Digital Transformation Agency's 2023 updated Web Accessibility requirements set a firmer compliance timeline for Commonwealth entities, with agencies expected to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards across their public web properties. Duplicate images without consistent alt-text tagging are a direct compliance failure under those standards.

Second, cloud storage is no longer effectively free. Agencies that migrated to cloud-hosted content management platforms discovered their storage bills climbing. One technology procurement report tabled in Senate Estimates in early 2025 noted that storage costs for a cohort of mid-size Commonwealth agencies had risen by an average of 34 per cent over three years, with redundant media files identified as a contributing factor. Deduplication was suddenly a budget line, not just a tidy-up job.

The practical fix — duplicate image replacement — involves running automated detection scripts across file libraries, flagging matches above a similarity threshold, then replacing secondary instances with canonical links back to a single master file. It sounds mechanical. In practice, inside agencies where content ownership is disputed between comms teams, IT teams, and ministerial offices, it generates considerable internal negotiation.

For the ACT government's digital team, working from its offices in the Dickson-based service delivery precinct, the priority has been the highest-traffic pages first: land development notices, health service directories, and the school enrolment sections that see surges every February and July. Federal agencies have generally prioritised ministerial and media pages, where image duplication is most visible to external users.

Anyone who manages a government website — or deals with one regularly — should check whether their content management system has a built-in asset deduplication tool enabled. Most modern platforms, including GovCMS, which hosts many Australian federal agency sites, include the function. The larger challenge, as agencies across Canberra have discovered, is not the technology. It is deciding who is responsible for pressing the button.