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

Federal agencies based in the parliamentary triangle and across Canberra's inner north are sitting on millions of duplicate image files — the accumulated debris of more than 20 years of uncoordinated digital storage. The problem has a name inside ICT circles: duplicate image proliferation. And after years of being treated as a low-priority housekeeping matter, it is now the subject of active remediation programs across several Commonwealth departments.

The timing matters. The Australian Public Service Commission's push toward whole-of-government digital platforms, accelerated by the Digital Transformation Agency's GovERP rollout and the broader consolidation of agency IT infrastructure, has forced departments to audit what they actually hold. What they found, in many cases, was chaos: the same photograph stored under a dozen different file names, across shared drives, content management systems, and legacy intranets — some of them dating to the Howard era.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to the late 1990s, when agencies first began digitising their communications functions. Departments on Northbourne Avenue and in the Barton precinct built their own websites, hired their own communications teams, and licensed their own image libraries — often from the same suppliers, without any central coordination. When machinery-of-government changes reshuffled agency responsibilities — and there have been dozens of such reshuffles since 2000 — files migrated between departments without any systematic deduplication. A photograph of Parliament House taken in 2003 might exist in 40 separate folders across what are now three different agencies.

The Australian National University's digital records research group, based on Acton Peninsula, has documented this pattern across public sector institutions in peer-reviewed work. The core finding is consistent: without enforced naming conventions and a centralised asset management layer, duplication rates in large organisations with distributed communications teams can exceed 60 percent of total image storage. That is not a Canberra-specific figure, but APS agencies exhibit the structural conditions — frequent restructures, high staff turnover, a preference for shared drives over purpose-built digital asset management systems — that drive rates toward the upper end of that range.

Storage costs are real. Commercial cloud storage pricing for government-grade services has hovered around $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard tiers, and agencies with image libraries running into hundreds of thousands of files can carry meaningful unnecessary expenditure simply from retaining duplicates across multiple repositories. Beyond cost, duplicate images create compliance headaches: when a photograph contains an identifiable person and exists in 30 locations, fulfilling a deletion request under the Privacy Act 1988 becomes an audit exercise rather than a simple administrative action.

The Current Remediation Push

The Digital Transformation Agency, headquartered on Constitution Avenue in Reid, has since mid-2025 included digital asset governance as a strand within its broader platforms consolidation work. Several large departments — including those with significant ACT-based workforces in Tuggeranong and Belconnen — have engaged external contractors to run hash-matching deduplication across their file stores. Hash-matching compares a unique digital fingerprint for each image, flagging identical files regardless of what they have been named or where they are stored.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics building on Duncan Street in Belconnen underwent one such audit in late 2025 as part of a broader data governance review, according to procurement notices published on AusTender. The scope included image assets held across both network-attached storage and SharePoint-based document libraries.

For communications teams doing the practical work, the process is straightforward in principle and tedious in execution. A deduplication tool generates a report; a human reviews edge cases — two images that are visually near-identical but technically distinct — and a retention decision is made for each cluster. The Victorian Government's Digital Services division published guidance on exactly this workflow in March 2025, and several ACT-based agencies have drawn on it.

Public servants dealing with this problem at the working level should document retention decisions as they go — a spreadsheet recording which file was kept, which were deleted, and why, creates an audit trail that matters if privacy or records compliance questions arise later. The National Archives of Australia's digital preservation guidance, updated in January 2026, addresses image file disposal and is the relevant authority for Commonwealth agencies weighing up what to keep.