How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Thousands of duplicate images are sitting inside the content management systems of ACT government websites, the result of more than a decade of rushed uploads, staff turnover, and no consistent policy for managing digital assets. The problem isn't new, but pressure to fix it has reached a tipping point in 2026 as agencies face tighter IT budgets and renewed scrutiny over web accessibility standards.

The issue matters now because the ACT government is mid-way through a broader digital transformation program, and duplicate image libraries are complicating efforts to migrate legacy content to modern platforms. For public servants in Civic and Barton who manage departmental websites, duplicate files create redundant storage loads, slow page performance, and — critically — can push screen readers and assistive technologies into loops that disadvantage users with disabilities.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem go back to roughly 2012, when most ACT directorates began transitioning from static HTML pages to content management systems. At the time, there was no whole-of-government digital asset policy. Individual teams inside agencies like the ACT Health Directorate and the Transport Canberra and City Services directorate uploaded images independently, often saving the same stock photograph or campaign banner under different filenames. When staff moved on — and in a city where public service churn is constant — institutional knowledge about what already existed in the system went with them.

The same pattern played out at the federal level, where agencies headquartered in Canberra's inner suburbs, including Barton and Parkes, operated under the Digital Transformation Agency's guidance but retained significant autonomy over day-to-day content management. The DTA's Content Strategy Framework, updated in 2021, flagged duplicate assets as a known inefficiency, but enforcement was left to individual agency chief digital officers.

ANU's 3A Institute and the University of Canberra's Faculty of Arts and Design have both examined digital infrastructure governance in the public sector over recent years, and their research points to the same structural cause: decentralised publishing without centralised asset registers. When teams at Tuggeranong Service Centres or Gungahlin walk-in centres needed a map graphic or a bilingual infographic, they uploaded a new copy rather than searching a shared library that, in many cases, was difficult to navigate or access remotely.

The Push for Systematic Replacement

By mid-2025, several ACT directorates had begun internal audits. The process of duplicate image replacement — identifying redundant files, selecting a canonical version, and updating all page references to point to that single version — is technically straightforward but labour-intensive. One content audit methodology commonly used in government contexts recommends allowing roughly 15 minutes of staff time per page reviewed; for a directorate running a 2,000-page website, that translates to 500 hours of remediation work before a single image is actually deleted.

Web accessibility is driving urgency more than storage costs alone. Under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, which Australian government agencies are expected to meet at AA compliance level, images must carry accurate and non-duplicated alt-text. When the same photograph exists under multiple filenames, different editors have often written different alt-text descriptions for each instance, creating inconsistencies that affect screen reader users. The ACT Human Rights Commission has, in past annual reports, referenced digital accessibility as an ongoing concern for government service delivery.

Federal agencies on the Parliamentary Triangle precinct face the same remediation challenge at larger scale. The National Archives of Australia on Queen Victoria Terrace has separately been working through digital preservation protocols that intersect with the duplicate asset problem — multiple scanned copies of the same historical document, stored at different resolutions with conflicting metadata, create their own classification headaches.

For Canberrans who interact with government websites daily — whether checking light rail timetables on the Transport Canberra site or looking up planning applications through the ACT Planning portal — the practical upshot should eventually be faster page loads and more consistent imagery. Agencies working through duplicate replacement audits this financial year are targeting completion before the end of the 2026–27 budget cycle, when the next round of platform migration contracts is expected to be finalised. Getting the asset libraries clean beforehand will materially reduce the cost of that migration — and, administrators hope, prevent the same mess from accumulating again.