Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Cities Tackling Digital Waste

The Australian Capital Territory government's digital records holdings contain hundreds of thousands of duplicate image files, a sprawl of redundant data that costs real money to store and creates genuine legal risk when agencies cannot quickly locate the authoritative version of a document. It is a problem that sits, unglamorously, at the intersection of procurement, freedom-of-information compliance, and basic IT hygiene — and Canberra, as a city whose entire economic identity is built around federal and territory government administration, is more exposed to it than almost anywhere else on earth.

The timing matters. The federal government's Digital Transformation Agency has been pushing agencies toward consolidated cloud infrastructure since at least 2023, and the ACT government's own Digital Strategy, published in 2024, identified data quality and deduplication as priority areas for the territory's ICT spending. That strategy set a target of reducing unstructured data holdings by 15 per cent across core directorates by the end of the 2025–26 financial year — a deadline that has just passed.

What Canberra Is Actually Doing

The ACT's approach has been shaped largely through the work of the Shared Services ICT branch, which manages back-end infrastructure for multiple territory directorates from its operations hub in Fyshwick. The branch has been running a deduplication pilot across the Health Directorate's imaging repositories — a particularly image-heavy environment where radiology scans, patient identification photos, and administrative documents accumulate rapidly. The Australian National University, which manages one of the largest non-government digital archives in the territory, separately adopted Microsoft Purview tools in early 2025 to identify redundant files across its research data stores on the Acton campus.

Neither effort is finished. Procurement documents published on the ACT government's Buy.ACT portal in the March 2026 quarter show the territory issued a request for quote seeking deduplication audit services valued at up to $480,000. That figure covers a scoping exercise only — implementation costs would come later. The University of Canberra, whose Bruce campus hosts the Health Research Institute, has been working through a separate process under its own IT governance framework.

How Other Cities Compare

Canberra is not alone, but it is arguably behind some comparable capitals. Wellington, New Zealand, completed a whole-of-government deduplication audit across its core public service in 2024 under the direction of Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, and the New Zealand government has published the outcome data openly. Edinburgh's City of Edinburgh Council, which like Canberra has a workforce heavily weighted toward public administration, contracted with a Scottish digital consultancy in 2023 to run automated deduplication across its planning and building records — a process the council said at the time covered more than 2.3 million files.

Singapore's Government Technology Agency, GovTech, has gone furthest among comparable jurisdictions. Since 2022 it has required all agencies using the whole-of-government IM8 cloud platform to run quarterly deduplication reports, with findings fed back to the Smart Nation Office. GovTech has reported that early rounds identified storage savings equivalent to several petabytes across the platform. Canberra has no equivalent mandatory reporting cycle yet.

The practical stakes for public servants in suburbs like Barton and Parkes, where the bulk of federal department offices sit, are less abstract than they might sound. When an agency cannot quickly confirm which version of an image or scanned document is the master copy, FOI response times blow out, audit processes get complicated, and the risk of releasing an outdated or incorrect document rises. The ACT Ombudsman's 2025 annual report noted delays in information access requests as a recurring theme, though it did not attribute them specifically to data management failures.

For residents and public servants watching the territory's ICT budget, the next milestone is the tabling of the ACT Budget in August 2026, which is expected to include a line item for the full deduplication rollout following completion of the scoping exercise. Anyone who works with government records — or who has ever lodged an FOI request through Access Canberra — has a reason to follow it.