Canberra Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Government Websites

Federal and ACT government agencies spent much of this week patching a sprawling duplicate image problem that had quietly embedded itself across dozens of official websites, internal intranets and public-facing digital services. The issue — where identical images were being indexed, stored and displayed multiple times across content management systems — first surfaced in late June and prompted emergency reviews at several Canberra-based departments by Wednesday, July 1.

The timing is uncomfortable. The Australian Public Service Commission has been pushing agencies hard since early 2026 to meet updated digital accessibility and efficiency benchmarks under the Digital Service Standard, a federal framework that governs how government websites must perform. Duplicate image files drive up storage costs, slow page-load times and can generate accessibility errors when automated alt-text tools flag repeated assets as conflicting entries — precisely the kind of problem the Standard was designed to prevent.

What Happened This Week

The week's activity centred on two main hubs. The Department of Finance, whose teams operate from the John Gorton Building on King Edward Terrace in Parkes, convened a cross-agency working group on Tuesday to coordinate responses. Separately, the Digital Transformation Agency — based in Canberra's CBD on Gawler Crescent, Phillip — circulated a technical advisory to Commonwealth entities outlining interim steps for identifying and removing duplicate assets from platforms running on GovCMS, the shared web publishing service used by more than 130 federal agencies.

The ACT government's own digital services team, sitting inside Access Canberra, identified the problem on territory websites linked to the myACT service portal. Staff conducted a manual audit of key landing pages used by Gungahlin and Belconnen residents — two of the territory's fastest-growing suburban corridors — where duplicate banner images had been loading on community services pages since at least mid-June. The Australian National University's digital communications office also confirmed this week it had run an internal sweep of web properties after noticing similar errors on faculty pages hosted through its Acton campus infrastructure.

For everyday users, the practical consequence was mostly invisible — slower load times and occasional broken image displays — but for government IT managers, the administrative headache is real. GovCMS, which is built on the open-source Drupal platform, stores media assets in a centralised library. When content editors upload the same image more than once without using the existing library item, duplicates accumulate. The Digital Transformation Agency's advisory, dated July 2, noted that some agencies had accumulated file libraries where between 15 and 30 per cent of stored images were duplicates, adding measurable drag to server response times.

Costs and the Compliance Clock

Storage costs alone are not trivial at scale. Whole-of-government cloud hosting contracts — administered through the Digital Transformation Agency's whole-of-government arrangements — bill agencies per gigabyte of data stored. While individual image files are small, libraries running into tens of thousands of assets across large departments translate into ongoing expenditure that auditors have flagged in previous annual efficiency reviews.

The ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, released by the Chief Minister's directorate last year, explicitly targets a reduction in redundant data holdings as part of its cloud efficiency goals. Duplicate media assets sit squarely in that category, which is why the Access Canberra audit this week fed directly into reporting due to the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate before the end of July.

Agencies have been told to complete initial duplicate-image audits by July 18. The Digital Transformation Agency's advisory recommends using automated scanning tools already available within the GovCMS platform to flag duplicate file hashes before any manual deletion occurs — a safeguard against accidentally removing images still in active use on published pages. For ACT government sites, the Access Canberra digital team will present audit findings at a July 22 internal review meeting. Residents who spot broken images or missing graphics on territory service pages in the meantime are encouraged to report them through the myACT feedback function, which logs issues directly to the relevant directorate's support queue.