How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Buried in Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Federal agencies clustered along Constitution Avenue and the ACT government's own directorates in Civic are quietly grappling with a problem that accumulated over more than a decade: enormous repositories of duplicate digital images clogging storage systems, complicating records management, and costing taxpayers money that nobody has properly tallied.

The issue is not new, but it has become impossible to ignore. The shift to cloud-based document management — accelerated hard by the 2020 pandemic, when tens of thousands of public servants in Canberra moved to remote work almost overnight — produced wave after wave of file duplication. Scanned forms, policy photographs, map tiles for planning applications, and departmental headshots were uploaded multiple times across multiple platforms, often because staff had no reliable way to check whether an asset already existed in the system.

How the Problem Built Up

Before about 2018, most ACT and federal agencies kept image libraries on local servers or shared network drives. The transition to platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and various cloud storage products began in earnest under the Australian Government's Secure Cloud Strategy, which the Department of Home Affairs formalised in 2017. Migration projects — handled agency by agency, sometimes directorate by directorate — rarely included deduplication as a mandatory step. Files were moved as-is, bringing their duplicates with them.

The ACT government's own digital estate compounded this pattern. The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, which manages planning imagery for growth corridors including Gungahlin and Belconnen, maintains aerial photography archives that date back to site assessments conducted when those suburbs were still paddock. Each planning cycle generated new scans; older copies were rarely retired. The result is overlapping image sets sitting across at least two separate content management platforms, according to publicly available ICT audit summaries the directorate has filed with the ACT Audit Office.

At the federal level, the National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has long flagged the challenge of digital preservation more broadly. Its most recent corporate plan, covering the 2024–27 period, identified the growing volume and fragmentation of born-digital records — including images — as a core risk to government recordkeeping. The Archives does not publish a figure for how many duplicate image files exist across the Commonwealth, and no central authority currently tracks that number.

Pressure to Clean Up

The push to address the issue has come from two directions simultaneously. Storage costs have risen. Cloud pricing models charge on volume, and agencies that ballooned their repositories during the pandemic are now facing renewal negotiations with vendors on less favourable terms than they struck in 2020 or 2021. At the same time, the Australian Government's Digital ID Act 2024, which took effect progressively from late 2024, has added new compliance pressure around how agencies store and manage images of individuals — identity photographs, in particular — because duplicates create audit headaches under privacy obligations.

The ACT government's Whole of Government ICT Strategy, updated in 2023, listed image asset management as one of several areas where directorates were expected to implement deduplication tooling by the end of the 2025–26 financial year. Whether all directorates met that benchmark is not yet publicly confirmed; the relevant progress report is expected to be tabled before the Legislative Assembly later this quarter.

For public servants working out of offices in Barton, Civic, and the newer fit-outs along Nara Circuit in Deakin, the practical friction is real. Staff managing communications or policy teams describe spending time hunting through multiple folders for an approved image — a process that would be unnecessary if a single, de-duplicated library existed. Several agencies have begun rolling out automated duplicate-detection tools as part of broader SharePoint housekeeping projects, though implementation is uneven.

The ACT government's next ICT governance report, due before the end of August 2026, will be the first formal opportunity to see which directorates have made measurable progress and which are still carrying the backlog. Agencies with large geospatial or planning-photography holdings — particularly those supporting the ongoing Light Rail Stage 2 assessment — will draw particular scrutiny given the volume of site imagery those projects generate.