Duplicate Images on Government Websites: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Federal and ACT government agencies are sitting on thousands of duplicate images spread across their public-facing digital platforms, and the people tasked with fixing it say the problem is bigger — and more expensive — than most departments have acknowledged. The issue, long treated as a low-priority technical footnote, is now surfacing in conversations about digital accessibility, storage costs, and the reliability of government communications.

The timing matters. The Australian Government's Digital Service Standard, managed by the Digital Transformation Agency on Treloar Crescent in the Canberra suburb of Campbell, requires agencies to maintain accessible, consistent content. Duplicate or mismatched images — a product of years of rushed site migrations, machinery-of-government changes, and siloed content management — undermine those standards directly, particularly for users who rely on screen readers or alternative text descriptions that often go unupdated when a duplicate image replaces an original.

What the Experts Are Pointing To

Digital governance specialists who advise Commonwealth agencies say the root cause is structural, not accidental. When departments merge or rebrand — as happened repeatedly following the 2022 federal election, which saw the creation of new entities including the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water — content migrates between systems without consistent auditing. Images get duplicated across content management platforms, metadata goes stale, and accessibility attributes such as alt-text either disappear or refer to images that no longer exist at their original file path.

The Australian National University's 3A Institute, based at the Acton campus near Sullivans Creek, has previously examined the governance challenges of digital infrastructure at scale. Researchers in that space consistently flag that the public sector underestimates the compounding cost of poor digital asset management — not just in storage, but in staff time spent locating, re-uploading, or recreating content that already exists somewhere in a system.

The ACT government's own digital properties are not immune. Service ACT, which operates the access.act.gov.au platform, completed a partial content audit in the 2024-25 financial year as part of an ongoing accessibility uplift project. That process identified multiple instances of image duplication across the site's service directory, particularly in sections that had been updated piecemeal during the COVID-19 service disruption period between 2020 and 2022.

Costs and Practical Pressures

Storage costs alone are modest at the individual agency level, but aggregated across the Commonwealth's more than 180 entities, they are not trivial. Cloud storage pricing through the government's whole-of-government agreements — negotiated through the Australian Government's cloud panel arrangements — runs at rates that make bulk duplication a line item worth auditing annually. Beyond storage, the real cost is in compliance: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, which agencies are expected to meet, flag duplicate or mismatched image content as a barrier to users with disabilities.

The National Library of Australia, located on Parkes Place in the parliamentary triangle, faces a version of this problem at archival scale. Its Trove platform, which aggregates digitised content from institutions across the country, has invested significantly in deduplication tooling to manage its holdings. Library staff have described the challenge in publicly available project documentation as one of the more persistent technical problems in large-scale digital preservation work.

For individual public servants managing agency websites from desks in Barton, Woden, or the Hume depot precinct, the practical advice from digital governance practitioners is consistent: audit before you migrate, enforce naming conventions at the point of upload, and ensure alt-text is reviewed — not just copied — whenever an image is reused. The Digital Transformation Agency publishes guidance on content governance through its digital.gov.au resource hub, and updated image-management guidelines were added to that hub in late 2025.

Agencies that have not yet conducted a structured image audit are being encouraged to factor one into their 2026-27 digital uplift budgets before the next round of machinery-of-government changes — widely expected after the federal budget cycle concludes — creates yet another round of content migration headaches.