Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Global Peers

Canberra's public sector holds one of the densest concentrations of digital image archives in the southern hemisphere, and a significant share of it is redundant. Across Commonwealth agencies clustered in Barton and Parkes, and research repositories at the Australian National University in Acton, duplicate image files are consuming storage budgets, slowing retrieval systems, and creating compliance headaches under the Australian Government's Digital Continuity 2020 policy framework — which remains active guidance for federal records management.

The issue has sharpened in 2026. Data storage costs for Australian federal agencies rose measurably over the past two financial years, driven in part by unstructured data sprawl — a category that includes image libraries accumulated through satellite programs, public communications, and research projects. The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has been working through a backlog of digitised records that includes thousands of duplicate scans produced during earlier bulk-digitisation drives.

What Canberra is doing — and what it isn't

The ACT government's Digital Strategy, released through the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, nominates deduplication as a target for whole-of-government efficiency. In practice, however, implementation has been uneven. Agencies in Civic and Woden that were surveyed as part of a 2025 internal review — the results of which were tabled in Senate Estimates — identified image deduplication as a known gap but reported limited budget allocation to address it before mid-2026.

ANU's Digital Humanities Research Centre, based on the Acton campus, has taken a more structured approach. The centre has piloted perceptual hashing tools — software that identifies near-identical images even when file names or metadata differ — across several of its historical photograph collections. The University of Canberra's Research Institute for Sociotechnical Futures, located on the Bruce campus off Kirinari Street, has run parallel trials with open-source deduplication pipelines for social-science image datasets collected between 2019 and 2024.

Neither institution has published final efficacy figures yet, but perceptual hashing tools used in comparable programs internationally have reduced image storage loads by between 18 and 40 per cent in documented case studies, according to findings published by the European Commission's Joinup digital government platform in March 2025.

How global counterparts compare

Wellington, New Zealand — a capital city with a similarly public-service-heavy workforce and a comparable national archive infrastructure — completed a whole-of-government image deduplication audit in 2024 through its Government Chief Digital Officer. The audit, covering 23 agencies, identified NZD 4.2 million in recoverable storage costs over three years. Wellington's Department of Internal Affairs published those findings publicly, giving other agencies a benchmark to work from.

Ottawa took a different path. The Government of Canada's Shared Services Canada program mandated deduplication tooling as part of a broader cloud migration that began in earnest in 2022, folding image libraries into automated pipeline management. By contrast, Singapore's Government Technology Agency embedded deduplication standards directly into its Digital Government Blueprint, requiring agencies to certify compliance annually.

Canberra has no equivalent whole-of-government audit, no published cost-recovery figure, and no mandatory deduplication certification cycle. What it does have is a framework — Digital Continuity 2020 — that creates the policy basis for one, should Treasury or the Department of Finance choose to require it. The next Commonwealth Budget cycle, due in May 2027, may be the practical trigger point for that kind of mandate to emerge, particularly if storage line items continue rising.

For public servants managing image libraries in agencies along Northbourne Avenue or tucked into the Canberra Airport precinct, the practical advice from records management professionals is consistent: audit first. Free and low-cost perceptual hashing tools — including open-source options such as ImageDedup and DupeGuru — can produce an initial duplicate count without capital expenditure. That count, once documented, becomes the evidence base for a budget case. Wellington did exactly that before its government committed a dollar to remediation. Canberra's agencies can too.