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

The problem did not appear overnight. Across Marcus Clarke Street, Constitution Avenue, and the suburban campuses of Barton and Woden, federal and territory agencies have quietly accumulated overlapping digital image libraries — the same stock photograph of Parliament House licensed three times by three separate departments, the same infographic rebuilt from scratch by contractors who had no idea it already existed two floors below them. The practice has a name now: duplicate image replacement. And Canberra's public sector is, belatedly, trying to fix it.

The timing matters. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, updated in late 2024, set a target of consolidating core digital assets across directorates by mid-2026. That deadline has now passed, and the territory's Chief Digital Officer unit — based in the ACT Treasury building on London Circuit — is in the middle of reviewing how far agencies have actually progressed. At the federal level, the Department of Finance's Shared Services agenda has been pushing similar rationalisation for years, with the Digital Transformation Agency providing frameworks that include guidance on managing visual content repositories.

How the Libraries Got So Cluttered

The roots of the duplication problem go back to the early 2010s, when agencies across Canberra's government precinct began digitising communications operations in earnest. Departments hired their own designers, procured their own subscriptions to services like Getty Images and Shutterstock, and built their own internal SharePoint folders — often with no visibility into what neighbouring agencies already owned. A parliamentary inquiry into public sector ICT procurement tabled in 2019 flagged exactly this kind of asset sprawl as a cost driver, but no binding whole-of-government remediation was legislated at that point.

By 2022, the Australian National Audit Office had noted in multiple performance audits that digital asset management practices across Commonwealth entities were inconsistent and, in some cases, untracked. The ACT's own Auditor-General office released findings in 2023 flagging similar gaps at the territory level, specifically in health and education directorates. The University of Canberra's News & Media Research Centre, based on Kirinari Street in Bruce, has also examined the downstream consequences — particularly for public communications teams that waste hours searching for images their own organisation already owns.

The costs are not trivial. Duplicate licensing fees alone can run into tens of thousands of dollars annually for a mid-sized agency, based on standard government rates for commercial image subscriptions, which typically start around $2,000 per user per year for enterprise-tier platforms. An agency with 40 communications staff spread across duplicated subscriptions can be paying for the same image rights multiple times without realising it. The ACT Public Service, which employs roughly 23,000 people across the territory, represents significant exposure across dozens of communications teams.

The Fix: Centralised Repositories and Audit Tools

The current push involves two parallel tracks. At the Commonwealth level, the Digital Transformation Agency has been piloting a whole-of-government digital asset register, with early adopters including Services Australia and the Department of Home Affairs. The idea is straightforward: before licensing or creating an image asset, a team checks the central register. If the asset exists, they use it. No new licence, no new production contract.

At the territory level, the ACT Government's Shared Services ICT division, operating out of Callam Offices in Phillip, has been running an internal audit using metadata-matching tools to identify visual duplicates across directorate servers. Results from the first phase, covering health and education, were expected to be reported to the ACT Digital Strategy Steering Committee in the June 2026 quarter.

For public servants in Gungahlin or Belconnen offices logging into internal systems, the practical change will eventually mean a single, searchable image portal rather than a patchwork of team SharePoint folders. Comms staff are being advised now to tag existing assets with standardised metadata and hold off on new stock image purchases until the consolidated register goes live — likely in the third quarter of 2026. It is unglamorous work, but the agencies that get it right will have something to show for it on next year's budget line.