ACT Government's Digital Records Push Hits Snag Over Duplicate Image Problem

The ACT Government's whole-of-government digital asset review, running since mid-June, struck a practical wall this week when agencies reported that duplicate image files account for a significant share of bloat across shared storage systems used by departments housed in the Civic and Barton precincts. The problem is not new, but pressure to fix it has intensified ahead of a planned migration to a consolidated cloud storage platform scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

The timing matters. The ACT Digital Strategy, which the Territory government has been advancing through the Chief Digital Officer's office on London Circuit, puts streamlined data management at its centre. Duplicate image replacement — the process of identifying redundant visual files, pulling them from circulation and substituting a single authoritative version — sounds routine. In practice, agencies running separate content management systems, some inherited from legacy setups predating the 2019 consolidation push, have found the task far messier than anticipated.

What Went Wrong This Week

On Tuesday, the ACT Government Shared Services division flagged internally that automated deduplication tools being trialled across three agencies — understood to include units within the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate on Constitution Avenue — had misidentified some unique archival images as duplicates. The error risked permanently replacing original reference photographs used in planning and heritage assessments with lower-resolution substitutes. Those images, some dating to surveys conducted before 2010, are used in decisions affecting development applications across suburbs including Gungahlin and inner Belconnen.

The issue drew attention at the University of Canberra's Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, where researchers have been working with public sector partners on image recognition tools. Scholars there have noted that off-the-shelf deduplication software performs poorly on near-identical but contextually distinct images — a recurring problem when dealing with time-series photography of the same site taken months or years apart. ANU's School of Computing has published related work on perceptual hashing limitations, research that appears not to have been factored into the procurement of the tools now causing headaches for ACT Shared Services.

Local Stakes in a Bureaucratic Problem

For Canberra's public servants, this is not an abstract IT headache. Planning photographs tied to heritage overlays in areas such as Braddon, Reid and the Kingston Foreshore precinct feed directly into Development Application assessments handled by the planning authority. If the wrong image is substituted into a case file — even temporarily — it can introduce errors into decisions with real-dollar consequences for applicants and residents.

The ACT Government's digital storage footprint has grown substantially over the past five years. Shared Services manages infrastructure that supports more than 23,000 territory public servants, a workforce that generates and stores imagery ranging from infrastructure inspection records to communications assets. Deduplication projects in comparable jurisdictions have demonstrated storage savings of between 20 and 40 per cent, according to published case studies from the Australian Digital Health Agency and various state government ICT reviews — figures that have clearly motivated the ACT's own efforts.

The Canberra-based National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has grappled with similar challenges at a federal scale, and its publicly available guidance on digital preservation distinguishes carefully between format migration, deduplication and replacement — a distinction the ACT project appears to have initially blurred.

Shared Services has reportedly paused the automated replacement phase of the project while staff conduct manual audits of flagged files. A revised approach is expected to be outlined to agency heads before the end of July. Anyone whose Development Application or heritage assessment is currently before the planning authority and involves photographic evidence would be well advised to confirm with their case officer that source documents are intact. The ACT Planning portal on the government's website provides a direct contact pathway for applicants who want to verify their file status. The broader cloud migration timeline has not been officially changed, but July's end-of-month checkpoint will be closely watched by digital officers across the territory's directorates.