Canberra's duplicate image problem: What officials, experts and key figures are saying

Federal and ACT government agencies are under mounting pressure to address the sprawling problem of duplicate images embedded in public records systems, with digital archivists and IT administrators warning that the cost of inaction is rising faster than most departments publicly acknowledge. The issue spans everything from duplicate photographs in planning applications lodged with the ACT Planning Directorate to repeated image files sitting inside National Archives of Australia holdings in Mitchell.

The timing matters. The ACT government's digital transformation agenda, which accelerated after the 2023 Service Delivery Reform program, has pushed more planning, licensing, and community services online. That migration has generated enormous volumes of image data — and, according to records management practitioners familiar with government workflows, significant duplication along the way. Agencies running legacy content management systems alongside newer cloud platforms have found themselves with identical files stored in multiple locations, sometimes flagged under different metadata tags.

What the specialists are saying

Records managers working across Civic-based government offices have raised concerns through the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia (RIMPA) network, which held its most recent ACT chapter meeting in June. The core argument from practitioners is straightforward: duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow search and retrieval, and create compliance headaches under the Archives Act 1983, which mandates accurate and accessible recordkeeping for Commonwealth agencies. The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has published guidance on digital preservation standards, but practitioners say agency-level implementation remains inconsistent.

At the Australian National University's College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics on Acton Peninsula, researchers working in the computer vision space have noted that automated deduplication tools — software that identifies visually identical or near-identical images using perceptual hashing algorithms — have matured significantly in the past three years. The technology is no longer experimental. Several state governments in Australia have piloted it within their land registry and planning systems. The question for Canberra's agencies is less about whether the tools work and more about who pays for the integration project and who owns the governance framework afterward.

The University of Canberra's iSchool, based on Kirinari Street in Bruce, runs postgraduate courses in information management that directly address these scenarios. Faculty in that program have pointed to the ACT's relatively small but highly networked public sector as both a challenge and an advantage: agencies here share staff, sometimes share systems, and are physically concentrated enough that cross-agency coordination is more feasible than in larger jurisdictions. That proximity hasn't yet translated into a unified deduplication policy, but it does mean a pilot program could move quickly if ministerial support materialised.

The cost question nobody wants to answer publicly

Storage is not free. Cloud storage pricing for government-grade services in Australia — including the services used by agencies under whole-of-government contracts managed through the Department of Finance — runs at commercial rates, and duplicated image files directly inflate those costs. No public figure has yet put a specific dollar value on the ACT or federal government's duplicate image burden on the record, and requests to several agencies for comment had not been returned by deadline.

What is documented is the broader context. A 2024 report by the Australian National Audit Office on digital records management across Commonwealth entities flagged inconsistent metadata practices and poor lifecycle management as recurring findings across multiple agencies — conditions that digital archivists say are a direct precursor to the kind of duplication now drawing attention.

For public servants in Belconnen's large ServiceDesk hubs or the planning offices around London Circuit in Civic, the practical near-term step is an internal audit. Records managers recommend agencies run a deduplication scan against their image repositories before the end of the 2026–27 financial year, aligning the remediation work with annual ICT budget planning cycles. RIMPA's ACT chapter is expected to circulate updated guidance to member agencies in August. For now, the conversation is in the room — it just hasn't reached a decision yet.