How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried Under Duplicate Digital Images — and What It's Costing Them

Federal agencies clustered along Constitution Avenue and the ACT government's own digital infrastructure teams are now grappling with a shared problem that quietly compounded through nearly a decade of patchwork digitisation: duplicate images embedded in public-facing documents, internal databases, and web platforms have reached a scale that is measurably slowing systems and inflating storage costs.

The timing matters. Canberra's public sector has spent the past three years accelerating digital transformation programs — including the Australian Public Service Commission's Digital Capability Framework, rolled out progressively from 2023 — and that push exposed just how chaotic legacy content libraries had become. Every new platform migration pulled across old files, often multiple versions of the same photograph, diagram, or scanned form, without any systematic deduplication step built into the process.

How the Backlog Built Up

The problem did not arrive overnight. When agencies began digitising paper records in earnest through the 2010s — a process the National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, coordinated across dozens of Commonwealth bodies — image files were duplicated routinely. Different teams within the same department scanned the same documents independently. Web content management systems like the earlier iterations of australia.gov.au generated thumbnail variants alongside full-resolution files, all stored without cross-referencing.

Within the ACT government's own Directorate structure, a parallel pattern played out. The transition to the Shared Services ICT platform, which consolidated infrastructure for multiple ACT Directorates from a facility in Fyshwick, carried legacy content across without cleaning it first. Facilities like the Canberra Institute of Technology's Bruce campus and Access Canberra service centres in Dickson and Tuggeranong generated their own localised document repositories over the years, each with overlapping image sets.

Cloud storage made the problem cheaper to ignore for a while. When per-gigabyte costs dropped sharply through the mid-2010s, the financial incentive to deduplicate disappeared. Agencies stopped asking whether they needed three copies of the same ministerial headshot or seven versions of the same infrastructure map. Storage was cheap; staff time to clean it up was not.

The Shift Toward Active Replacement

That calculus has started to change. The federal government's Data and Digital Government Strategy, published in 2023, set expectations for agencies to demonstrate measurable efficiency gains from their digital investments by the end of the 2025–26 financial year. For content management teams, duplicate image replacement — identifying canonical versions of files and retiring redundant copies — became a line item in remediation plans.

Industry benchmarks from digital asset management consultancies suggest that government content libraries in organisations of comparable size to mid-tier Commonwealth departments can contain duplicate image rates of between 20 and 40 percent of total stored assets. Applying even the conservative end of that range to agencies with libraries measured in hundreds of thousands of files produces a significant storage and retrieval overhead.

At the Australian National University in Acton, library and digital repository staff have worked through similar deduplication exercises across the university's institutional image archive, and the experience has informed how some public sector teams are now approaching the task — prioritising high-traffic document sets first, rather than attempting a full library audit in one pass.

The ACT government's digital services team, operating under the Chief Digital Officer function within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate on London Circuit, is understood to be working through procurement options for automated deduplication tooling, though no contract has been publicly announced as of this week.

For agencies still mapping the scope of their problem, the practical advice from those further along is consistent: start with the documents that sit behind the most-visited web pages and the most-printed forms. In Canberra's public-service-heavy economy, where Access Canberra and federal agency service portals handle millions of transactions annually, even modest reductions in file bloat translate into faster load times for staff and residents alike. Getting the foundation right before the next platform migration is the argument every project lead is now making to their executive — because the cost of carrying duplicates forward is no longer invisible.