Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions Ahead for the ACT Government

ACT government agencies are facing a decision point over how to handle thousands of duplicate images embedded across public-facing digital platforms, internal records systems, and planning portals — a problem that has compounded steadily since a 2021 consolidation of several territory databases onto a shared infrastructure managed through Shared Services ICT. The question now is not whether to act, but how fast, and who pays.

The issue matters because the ACT is mid-cycle on several major digital transformation commitments, including the rollout of updated planning and development portals tied to the 2023 Planning Act reforms. Duplicate image data inflates storage costs, slows search and retrieval functions, and — in some cases involving property records and development applications — creates genuine regulatory risk if staff or the public retrieve the wrong version of a document.

Where the Problem Bites Hardest

The most acute pressure points are in two areas: the ACT Planning portal used by developers and residents lodging development applications along growth corridors in Gungahlin and Belconnen, and the digital records infrastructure underpinning the ACT Heritage Register, managed out of the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate's offices on Canberra Avenue in Fyshwick. Both systems were identified in internal reviews as carrying image duplication rates that complicate document retrieval during peak lodgement periods — typically the weeks before quarterly planning committee meetings at 16 Challis Street in Dickson.

The Australian National University's digital governance research group at the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics has been studying similar problems in federal agency systems. Their published work suggests that unmanaged duplication in government image repositories typically adds between 12 and 18 per cent to annual storage and maintenance costs — a figure that, if applicable to the ACT's Shared Services environment, would represent a meaningful line item given the territory runs a consolidated ICT budget covering more than 30 directorates and authorities.

The University of Canberra's Health and Wellbeing Research Institute has also flagged related concerns in its digital health records pilot, launched in March 2025 in partnership with ACT Health Directorate, where duplicate patient imaging files were identified as a workflow issue at the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children in Garran within the first six months of the program going live.

The Decisions That Will Shape the Fix

Three choices now sit before Shared Services ICT and the directorates it serves. The first is a full deduplication audit — a systematic sweep using automated tooling to identify and flag redundant image files before human review. Industry pricing for a project of that scope in a mid-sized government environment typically runs between $400,000 and $750,000 depending on system complexity, according to publicly available tender results from comparable Australian state government procurements.

The second option is a governance-first approach: tightening the upload and naming conventions that allow duplicates to enter systems in the first place, without touching the existing backlog. Cheaper upfront, but it leaves legacy problems intact and does nothing for the planning portal's current retrieval delays.

The third path — and the one generating the most internal discussion, according to documents released under freedom of information requests earlier this year — is a staged hybrid: automated deduplication of the highest-volume repositories by the end of the 2026–27 financial year, with governance reforms layered on simultaneously.

The ACT Budget, handed down in June 2026, allocated $2.1 million to Shared Services ICT for broader digital infrastructure maintenance. Whether any of that flows specifically to image management will depend on decisions expected from the Directorate of Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development before September 30 — the deadline set in internal planning documents for locking in project scopes for the new fiscal year.

For residents and developers using the ACT Planning portal, the practical upshot is straightforward: the current system works, but not as well as it should, and the window for a properly resourced fix is open right now. If the staged hybrid approach is chosen and funded before the September deadline, Gungahlin and Belconnen applicants could see improved portal performance by mid-2027. If the decision slips, another year of patchwork is the likely result.