How Canberra Is Tackling the Duplicate Image Problem — and Where It Falls Behind

Canberra's land and property records system holds tens of thousands of digitised documents — and an unknown but significant portion of them are duplicates, scanned multiple times across different agencies and stored in siloed databases that rarely talk to each other. It is a problem that has quietly ballooned as the ACT government pushed through rapid digitisation programs after 2020, and one that administrators in Wellington, Edinburgh and Singapore have all grappled with in recent years.

The issue matters now because the ACT government is mid-way through a broader data consolidation push tied to its Digital Strategy 2025–2028, which commits agencies to rationalising storage infrastructure and cutting redundant records. Duplicate images — everything from scanned planning permits for new developments in Gungahlin to heritage documentation for buildings along Northbourne Avenue — inflate storage costs, slow down search and retrieval times, and create compliance headaches when multiple versions of the same document carry different metadata tags.

What Other Cities Have Done

Singapore's government completed a whole-of-government deduplication sweep of its land registry image holdings in 2023, reportedly cutting redundant file volumes by roughly 34 percent across three agencies. Wellington City Council took a different approach, embedding automated hash-checking tools directly into its document management platform from 2022, catching duplicates at the point of upload rather than retrospectively. Edinburgh's City Archives ran a targeted project through 2024 focused on historical planning records, using optical character recognition cross-referencing to flag near-duplicate scans where documents had been photocopied and re-scanned with slight degradation.

Canberra has no equivalent program operating at that scale yet. The ACT Planning directorate and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate — both based in Civic — each maintain separate image repositories that were not designed with cross-agency deduplication in mind. Access Canberra's service portal, which fields land information requests from residents in suburbs like Belconnen and Tuggeranong, pulls from yet another layer of stored records.

The Australian National University's 3A Institute, based on the Acton campus, has been researching data governance frameworks that directly apply to this class of problem. Researchers there have argued in published work that the cost of retrospective deduplication rises exponentially the longer an organisation waits — a dynamic that local government archivists in Auckland found to be accurate when they audited their own systems in 2024 and discovered cleanup costs had tripled compared to projections made in 2019.

Local Costs and Practical Pressures

Cloud storage is not free. The ACT government's whole-of-government cloud infrastructure contract, managed through Shared Services, carries annual costs that agency budget submissions must account for by the end of each financial year. Duplicate image files consume real storage allocation — and with agencies under pressure to stay within ICT budget envelopes after the 2026 federal budget tightened grants to territories, the inefficiency has a direct dollar figure attached, even if that figure has not been made public.

For public servants processing development applications along the light rail corridor between Civic and Gungahlin — an area generating a high volume of planning documentation — finding the right version of a scanned document among multiple near-identical copies takes time that compounds across hundreds of applications a month. Residents lodging queries at the Belconnen Community Service Centre on Benjamin Way report wait times for document retrieval that staff privately attribute partly to back-end search inefficiencies.

What happens next depends largely on whether the Digital Strategy's 2026 milestone review, expected in the third quarter of this year, flags deduplication as a priority workstream. Agencies that have already begun voluntary cataloguing — including the ACT Heritage Library, which holds digitised photographic records of old Canberra dating back to the city's surveying era — are ahead of the curve. For those that have not, the lesson from Wellington and Singapore is consistent: build the detection into the workflow early, because cleaning up afterwards costs considerably more. Residents and public servants waiting on faster records access will be watching whether the Territory's next budget cycle includes any line item to match the ambition of the Digital Strategy's own stated targets.