Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Canberra's public sector has a data problem it can no longer defer. Across ACT government directorates, duplicate digital images — scanned documents, planning photos, infrastructure records — have accumulated across siloed storage systems for years, and the bill for fixing it is landing on agency budgets already stretched by the 2026-27 federal funding cycle.

The issue matters now because the ACT Government's whole-of-government digital records framework, administered through the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate on Civic Square, is under review. Agencies have until September 30, 2026 to submit compliance reports under the Territory Records Act 2002, and duplicate image libraries sitting inside unaudited SharePoint environments and legacy network drives have emerged as a specific compliance headache for at least four directorates, according to records management guidance published on the Access Canberra website.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

The City Renewal Authority, which oversees development along Northbourne Avenue and through the Dickson and Braddon urban renewal corridors, holds extensive photographic archives tied to planning approvals and public domain works. Multiple versions of the same site photography — sometimes three or four near-identical JPEGs taken seconds apart — have been logged across both the Authority's own systems and the broader ACT Planning directorate's shared drives. The Australian National University's archives and records team on Acton Peninsula faces a parallel issue: the university's digitisation push between 2021 and 2024 produced overlapping image sets stored across both the university's local servers and its Microsoft Azure cloud tenancy.

Transport Canberra, responsible for the light rail corridor from Gungahlin Town Centre south through Flemington Road, also holds substantial infrastructure image sets from Stage 1 construction documentation. With Stage 2 planning documents now entering formal review, the directorate is under internal pressure to reconcile its image registries before the new project's records are added to an already cluttered system.

The practical stakes are not trivial. Storage costs for unmanaged government cloud environments in the ACT context run at roughly $0.023 per gigabyte per month under standard Azure government pricing tiers — modest individually, but duplicated image libraries across multiple directorates can run into terabytes. More significant is the risk under the Territory Records Act: improperly managed duplicates can complicate freedom of information requests, slow down planning appeals heard at the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal on London Circuit, and create evidentiary gaps if infrastructure disputes reach the courts.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices will define how this plays out before the end of 2026. First, agencies must decide whether to run a manual curation process — expensive in staff hours — or procure automated deduplication software, which carries upfront licensing costs but has been used successfully by Services Australia and the Department of Finance at the federal level. Second, the ACT Government needs to settle which directorate owns the central image repository function. Currently both Access Canberra and the City Renewal Authority operate independent systems with no common taxonomy, meaning a photograph of a site on Cooyong Street could legitimately exist in four separate databases with four different metadata tags.

Third, and most consequentially, agencies need to determine retention rules before they delete anything. Under the Territory Records Act, some infrastructure images carry a 25-year minimum retention requirement. Deleting a duplicate that turns out to be the only surviving copy of a specific date-stamped site record is not a recoverable error.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025-2028, published by CMTEDD, nominates data governance as a priority action area, but sets no specific milestones for resolving legacy duplication. Advocacy from the records management sector, including the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia, has been pushing for a common metadata standard across ACT agencies since at least 2023. That standard does not yet exist.

For agencies working toward the September compliance deadline, the immediate practical step is a scoping audit — not a full remediation, but a count. Knowing the scale of the problem is the minimum required before any procurement or deletion decision can proceed responsibly. Without that number on the table, the September reports will note the problem and defer the solution, exactly as they did last year.