How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Why It Took Years to Fix

Thousands of duplicate images are embedded across the federal government's public-facing websites, a problem that has compounded quietly since agencies began migrating to centralised content management platforms in the early 2010s. The scale of the issue — affecting departments headquartered along Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle and in Barton, Parkes and Woden — has prompted a coordinated remediation effort that digital teams are now racing to complete before a looming infrastructure audit deadline.

The timing matters. The Australian Government's whole-of-government website consolidation program, which funnelled dozens of agency sites onto the GovCMS platform administered by the Digital Transformation Agency, was designed to reduce cost and improve accessibility. What it also did, inadvertently, was inherit years of poorly tagged, repeatedly uploaded image assets from legacy systems. Every migration brought duplicates with it. Every content refresh added more.

How the Problem Compounded Over a Decade

The pattern is consistent across agencies. When a communications officer at, say, the Department of Finance on Kings Avenue needed a stock image of Parliament House for a budget explainer, the easiest path was to upload a new copy rather than search an existing media library. Over five years, that same aerial photograph of the building might exist in 40 separate folders across the same site. Multiply that by the number of agencies sharing GovCMS infrastructure and the redundancy becomes structural.

The ACT Government's own digital properties have followed a parallel trajectory. The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, which oversees ACT Government digital services from its offices in Canberra City, conducted an internal content audit in early 2024 that identified significant image duplication across the Access Canberra portal. The audit's findings, while not publicly released in full, informed a subsequent overhaul of the portal's asset management protocols that was still being implemented as of mid-2025.

At the Australian National University in Acton, the communications and marketing division confronted the same problem at institutional scale. ANU's web estate spans hundreds of subsites covering research colleges, student services and alumni programs. A project launched in 2023 to consolidate those subsites onto a unified Drupal framework revealed that a single hero image — a photograph of the Chifley Library reading room — had been independently uploaded 67 times across different college sites, each version carrying different file names, different alt-text, and in some cases different compression artefacts.

Why Duplicate Images Are More Than a Storage Problem

The practical consequences go beyond disk space. Search engine indexing is degraded when crawlers encounter multiple identical images at different URLs, a problem that affects how citizens find government information. Accessibility audits conducted under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 — compliance with which federal agencies are required to demonstrate — regularly flag duplicate assets as a source of inconsistent alt-text, meaning screen reader users get different descriptions of the same image depending on which page they land on.

Page load performance is the other measurable cost. A 2023 report by the Australian Digital Health Agency, examining its own website architecture, found that unoptimised and duplicated media assets contributed to page load times that exceeded the four-second threshold identified in federal accessibility benchmarks on more than 30 percent of tested pages. The agency, which operates from Canberra as well as Sydney offices, subsequently reduced its active image library by consolidating assets under a structured naming taxonomy.

For the public servants who manage these systems — a workforce concentrated in Canberra's inner suburbs of Barton, Forrest and Reid — the remediation work is unglamorous and time-consuming. It requires manually reviewing asset libraries, establishing canonical image records, and updating internal links across sometimes hundreds of pages. The Digital Transformation Agency has since updated its GovCMS onboarding documentation to include media library hygiene as a mandatory step in any new site build or migration, a change that took effect in late 2025.

Agencies beginning a content migration or site refresh in 2026 are being advised to run automated duplicate-detection tools — several of which integrate directly with Drupal and WordPress — before importing any existing media. For ACT Government teams, the Access Canberra portal rebuild currently underway offers a clean-slate opportunity to establish the kind of centralised asset governance that, had it existed a decade ago, might have prevented the problem from arising in the first place.