How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Why It's Finally Being Fixed

The ACT Government's digital services directorate is moving to implement a territory-wide duplicate image replacement program across its public-facing websites, a housekeeping effort that has become necessary after more than a decade of fragmented content management across agencies. The immediate trigger is an audit completed in June 2026 that identified systematic duplication across platforms managed by directorates including Transport Canberra and City Services and the ACT Health directorate.

The timing matters. The ACT is mid-way through a broader digital modernisation push, with the whole-of-government Content Management System transition — which began shifting agencies away from legacy platforms in 2023 — still incomplete. That transition created a chaotic window in which content teams at multiple directorates uploaded image libraries independently, often pulling from the same stock sources or reusing internal photography without a shared asset register. The result: the same aerial shot of the Lake Burley Griffin foreshore, the same stock photo of a Canberra Hospital corridor, appearing dozens of times across unrelated web pages, sometimes in different resolutions and with conflicting alt-text descriptions.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to at least 2019, when the ACT Government's ServicesCanberra portal first consolidated several standalone agency sites under a unified URL structure. The consolidation was done in stages, agency by agency, and each migration team was largely responsible for its own image assets. Without a central digital asset management system at that point, images were often uploaded fresh rather than reused from a shared library — meaning a photograph taken at the Gungahlin town centre, for instance, might exist as twelve separate files across six different pages, each slightly differently cropped and named.

Canberra is not unique in facing this. The Australian National University's digital communications team dealt with a comparable problem in 2021 after consolidating college and faculty websites onto a single WordPress multisite installation. ANU's communications staff identified more than 40,000 duplicate or near-duplicate image files during that clean-up — a figure that became something of a cautionary benchmark for other institutions in the capital watching the process unfold. The University of Canberra undertook a similar audit of its Bruce campus web presence in 2022.

For federal government agencies headquartered in Canberra, the problem sits with the Digital Transformation Agency's guidance framework. The DTA's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy has since 2022 required that all federal sites meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards, and duplicated images with inconsistent or missing alt-text directly breach those requirements. Several Canberra-based department websites — including agencies along the Kings Avenue and London Circuit precinct — are still working through compliance reviews.

What a Fix Actually Involves

Replacing duplicate images is not simply a matter of deleting files. Each instance must be checked for whether it carries unique metadata, whether it is referenced by other pages, and whether the replacement asset meets current accessibility standards. For government sites, there is also an archival obligation: under the Territory Records Act 2002, some web content including images may need to be preserved rather than deleted outright, which means the directorate is working with the ACT Territory Records Office on a disposal authority before bulk removals proceed.

The practical work is being handled in phases. High-traffic pages — including the Transport Canberra light rail information pages, which draw significant traffic ahead of the ongoing Stage 2 debate, and the ACT Health vaccination booking portal — are being prioritised in the first phase, expected to conclude by September 2026. Lower-traffic directorate pages will follow through the remainder of the financial year.

For public servants across Canberra's inner north and Barton who manage agency web content day-to-day, the immediate practical advice from the directorate is to stop uploading images directly to the content management system and instead route all new image requests through the shared asset portal that went live in April 2026. Images already in that portal carry verified metadata, accessible alt-text, and a unique identifier that prevents re-duplication. It is a small procedural change, but after ten years of digital drift, it is where the cleanup has to begin.