How Canberra's Public Agencies Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing Them to Fix It

The National Archives of Australia holds more than 14 kilometres of physical records in its Mitchell facility off Flemington Road. The digital equivalent — billions of image files scattered across Commonwealth agency servers — is proving far harder to measure, let alone tidy up. A growing push within the Australian Public Service to audit and replace duplicate digital images is exposing just how fractured government content management became during the 2010s procurement free-for-all.

The problem did not arrive overnight. It accumulated across budget cycles, machinery-of-government changes, and the kind of departmental restructures that Canberra specialises in. When agencies merged, split, or rebranded — the Australian Border Force's creation in 2015 being one of the more dramatic examples — their digital asset libraries rarely merged cleanly. Stock photo subscriptions were duplicated. Internal photography archives were copied across shared drives. Nobody was assigned to reconcile them.

How the Duplication Built Up

By the early 2020s, the Digital Transformation Agency, based at 50 Marcus Clarke Street in the city, was fielding requests from departments struggling with what insiders in the web-content world call "image debt" — libraries so bloated with near-identical files that routine website updates became slow, expensive exercises in archaeology. A single banner image for a ministerial landing page might exist in seven slightly different crops across three separate content management systems.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, whose offices sit on Northbourne Avenue in Belconnen, provides a useful proxy for scale. The ABS has publicly reported managing tens of thousands of web assets across its data.gov.au integrations alone. Multiply that administrative footprint across the roughly 170 non-corporate Commonwealth entities and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast.

The ACT government has been wrestling with a version of the same problem at the territory level. Access Canberra, which handles citizen-facing services for the ACT, undertook a content audit of its website in 2023 after complaints that search results were surfacing outdated imagery — some dating to before the 2020 rebrand of the service. The audit, documented in territory procurement notices, led to a contract for digital asset management support. Similar audits are now standard practice before any major CMS migration.

The Cost of Doing Nothing — and the Cost of Cleaning Up

Storage is cheap. Governance is not. The real expense of duplicate images is not the server space — AWS and Azure pricing has fallen sharply since 2020 — but the staff time consumed resolving which version of an image is current, accessible, correctly licensed, and appropriately tagged for the Australian Government's web accessibility requirements under WCAG 2.1.

A mid-sized Commonwealth agency undertaking a full digital asset audit can expect to spend between $80,000 and $250,000 on the exercise, depending on library size and the complexity of its legacy CMS stack, according to publicly released statements of work on AusTender from 2024 and 2025. Several contracts listed on AusTender explicitly name duplicate-image remediation as a deliverable.

ANU's Digital Humanities program at Acton has been tracking this space as a research interest, noting that the administrative architecture of the Commonwealth — where each agency operates as a largely autonomous entity — structurally encourages asset duplication because centralised purchasing decisions are the exception rather than the rule.

The timing matters because the federal government is mid-way through its broader digital infrastructure uplift, with the DTA's Whole of Government Platforms initiative pushing agencies toward shared services. If agencies are migrating CMS platforms over the next two to three years — which the DTA's published roadmap anticipates — arriving at a new platform with a bloated, duplicate-heavy image library simply imports the old problem into a new environment.

For public servants managing content in Barton, Parkes, or the new Woden office blocks filling up along Bowes Street, the practical implication is straightforward: the time to audit your image library is before the migration, not after. Commonwealth agencies with scheduled platform upgrades before the end of the 2026-27 financial year would be well advised to treat duplicate image replacement not as a cosmetic exercise but as foundational infrastructure work. The agencies that skipped that step a decade ago are the ones now paying to fix it.