How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing Them

Canberra's public sector has a clutter problem — and it lives inside hard drives, not filing cabinets. Across Commonwealth departments headquartered in the Parliamentary Triangle and ACT government offices from Civic to Tuggeranong, digital asset managers are confronting libraries where the same photograph, map or infographic exists in dozens of variations, tagged differently, stored separately and billed for repeatedly through cloud storage contracts.

The problem didn't appear overnight. It is the accumulated result of three distinct pressures: a decade of agency restructures that merged and split departments without consolidating their file systems; competitive procurement cycles that handed different business units different content management platforms; and a frantic 2020-to-2022 digitisation surge, when teams across the Australian Public Service raced to put operations online during the COVID-19 pandemic and generated enormous volumes of image assets with almost no deduplication governance in place.

How the Mess Was Made

The structural roots go back to the 2013-14 machinery-of-government changes that folded agencies in and out of portfolios at a pace that left IT teams little time for orderly asset migration. A department absorbed into a larger entity would bring its SharePoint library, its Drupal media folders and its standalone image archive — and all three would typically be preserved in parallel rather than merged and cleaned. By the time the next restructure arrived, the problem had compounded.

The Australian National University's digital humanities researchers in Acton have documented this pattern in the broader public sector context, noting how institutional mergers routinely produce what archivists call "shadow libraries" — parallel repositories that no single team owns or audits. At the municipal level, the ACT Government's own Shared Services ICT directorate, which provides technology infrastructure to ACT public service agencies operating out of offices in Macquarie and Phillip, flagged duplicate digital asset management as an area requiring remediation in its 2023-24 service review cycle.

Cloud storage economics made the problem expensive rather than merely untidy. Most federal agencies migrated bulk storage to platforms such as Microsoft Azure or AWS between 2019 and 2022 under the Digital Transformation Agency's cloud-first policy framework. Storage costs on those platforms are metered by gigabyte. A 2024 Australian National Audit Office report on ICT expenditure across 18 Commonwealth entities found that unmanaged data growth — including redundant files — was a contributor to cost overruns in cloud contracts, though the ANAO did not isolate duplicate images as a specific line item.

The duplication problem also has a practical communications cost. Graphic designers at agencies along London Circuit and King Edward Terrace have described — in industry forums rather than on the record — the experience of searching an internal DAM system for a specific photograph of Parliament House, finding 47 variations with inconsistent metadata, and ultimately re-commissioning a new image rather than risk using an outdated or rights-expired file. That behaviour, repeated across dozens of teams, is itself a driver of further duplication.

What Remediation Actually Looks Like

The response has been slow but is now accelerating. The Digital Transformation Agency, based in Canberra's CBD on Challis Street, has encouraged whole-of-government adoption of the DAMS (Digital Asset Management System) standards first circulated in draft in late 2024. Those standards include explicit guidance on deduplication workflows — requiring agencies to run hash-based matching across repositories before any new cloud migration, and to nominate a single "canonical" file when duplicates are identified.

For the ACT Government, the challenge is more compact but no less fiddly. The government's content teams, who produce imagery for everything from Light Rail Stage 2 community consultation materials to public health campaigns distributed through the Canberra Health Services network, operate across at least four separate content management environments according to the Shared Services ICT directorate's published service catalogue.

Agencies that have begun deduplication projects report that the initial audit phase — running automated tools to identify matching or near-matching files — typically takes six to ten weeks for a mid-sized repository, followed by a human review period to resolve ambiguous matches. The payoff is real: early movers in the Commonwealth space have reported storage cost reductions of between 15 and 30 percent once redundant assets are retired, though individual results vary significantly depending on how disorganised the original library was. For agencies still sitting on legacy on-premise servers in nondescript government buildings off Barrier Street in Fyshwick, the first step remains simply getting everything into a single inventory — before the question of what to delete can even be asked.