How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Federal and ACT government digital teams are confronting a problem years in the making: thousands of duplicate images clogging agency websites, slowing page loads, inflating storage costs and undermining the accessibility standards that public sector sites are legally required to meet. The issue, which spans platforms managed by departments clustered around the Barton and Parkes precincts as well as ACT Health and the Australian Public Service Commission, did not emerge overnight.

The roots go back to the post-2013 wave of whole-of-government website consolidation, when dozens of federal agencies were pushed onto the australia.gov.au and later the GOV.AU beta framework. Content teams, often understaffed and working against tight migration deadlines, copied image assets manually rather than linking to a shared digital asset management system. The same photograph of Parliament House, the same stock graphic of a Canberra suburb at dawn, was uploaded separately by separate teams inside the same building on the same day.

A Problem Baked In at Migration Time

The ACT government's own digital estate compounded the pattern. When the Territory moved bulk content onto its current CMS platform — a process that accelerated between 2018 and 2021 — the Transport Canberra and City Services directorate, Access Canberra and the Chief Minister's directorate each managed their own image libraries with minimal cross-referencing. Light rail Stage 1 opening content alone generated multiple versions of near-identical promotional photography, stored in separate folders across at least three separate backend repositories, according to internal digital standards documentation published by the ACT Digital Strategy office.

The practical consequences stack up quickly. Duplicate images inflate server storage consumption, which for cloud-hosted government sites translates directly into ongoing expenditure. They also create compliance headaches: under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard — which federal agencies are required to meet under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 — each image requires accurate alt-text. When the same image exists in 14 places under 14 different filenames, alt-text quality becomes wildly inconsistent, creating real barriers for Canberrans using screen readers to access services at the Centrelink office on Northbourne Avenue or the Medicare hub in Civic.

The Australian National Audit Office flagged digital asset governance as an area of concern in a 2023 report examining whole-of-government digital service delivery, noting that fragmented content management practices increased both cost and risk across agencies. That finding did not prompt immediate remediation across the board, but it set the groundwork for what became the current push.

What the Cleanup Actually Looks Like

The Digital Transformation Agency, based at 50 Marcus Clarke Street in the city, has been piloting an automated duplicate-detection tool across a cohort of federal agency sites since late 2025. The tool uses perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually identical or near-identical images regardless of filename or format — and flags candidates for consolidation or deletion. Early results from the pilot, covering six agencies, identified duplication rates of between 18 and 34 per cent across image libraries, meaning roughly one in four uploaded images was already stored elsewhere on the same site.

For ACT government platforms, the Digital Strategy unit within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate is mapping its own library. The first formal audit report is expected in the third quarter of 2026, with rectification work likely extending into 2027 given the volume of content involved across Transport Canberra's light rail and bus network pages, Access Canberra's service portals and the ACT Health website, which alone hosts several thousand images related to COVID-era communications that have never been reviewed post-pandemic.

For public servants in Gungahlin and Belconnen who rely on government websites to navigate services, the fix matters more than the bureaucratic backstory. Faster pages, consistent image descriptions and streamlined content will make digital government services more usable — particularly on mobile connections in outer suburbs where load times already lag. The lesson from how this mess accumulated is simple: skipping a shared asset library to meet a migration deadline costs far more to fix than it ever saved on day one.