Duplicate Images in ACT Government Records: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

ACT government agencies are sitting on a problem that has been quietly accumulating for years: duplicate digital images embedded across public records systems, from planning documents lodged with the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate on Dickson's Challis Street to procurement files held by the ACT Government Shared Services division in Fyshwick. The question of what to do about them — and who pays — is about to get harder to avoid.

The issue matters now because several major projects are converging at once. Light Rail Stage 2B, the long-contested extension running south toward Woden, requires large volumes of scanned design and environmental assessment documents to be integrated into a single project management repository. Meanwhile, the ACT's digital records modernisation program, which agencies have been rolling into since 2024 under the territory's whole-of-government ICT strategy, is exposing duplicate image files at a scale that record managers say they were not fully prepared to handle.

Where the Duplication Is Worst

The problem is not evenly distributed. Agencies that went through rapid digitisation pushes during the 2020–2022 period — when COVID-era grant programs funded back-scanning of paper files — are now finding that batch processing created multiple copies of the same image at different resolutions, under different file names, sometimes stored in separate folder trees within the same system. The ACT Education Directorate, which digitised a substantial volume of school records across its 89 public schools during that period, and Access Canberra, which processes high volumes of licensing and compliance imagery, are understood to be among the directorates with the largest remediation tasks, based on the scope of their digitisation activity at the time.

Duplicate images are not merely a storage nuisance. When a record manager retrieves the wrong version of a planning map, or an automated workflow pulls a low-resolution duplicate rather than the authorised master, the downstream consequences can include incorrect decisions, failed audits, and — in the case of building or infrastructure files — potential safety implications. The ACT Auditor-General's office has previously examined records management compliance across territory agencies, and digital asset integrity has featured in past performance audit frameworks as a risk indicator.

Storage costs are real. Cloud storage for government-grade repositories in Australia typically runs between $80 and $200 per terabyte per month depending on redundancy and security classifications, and agencies carrying duplicate image libraries at scale are, in effect, paying twice for the same data. A directorate holding even 50 terabytes of redundant image data could be absorbing several thousand dollars monthly in avoidable costs — money that sits outside program budgets and rarely draws ministerial attention until an audit flags it.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices are now in front of ACT agencies, and the window for deferring them is closing. The first is whether to run a territory-wide deduplication audit through a centralised tool — something Shared Services ICT could theoretically coordinate — or leave each directorate to manage remediation independently, which risks inconsistent standards and further fragmentation. The second is whether the master-image designation process should be manual, with record managers signing off on each authorised version, or automated through hash-matching algorithms that flag identical files regardless of name or location. Manual processes are more defensible in an audit but are also slower and more expensive in staff time. The third decision involves retention policy: duplicate images that have existed in a system for more than two years may have been referenced in other documents, and deleting them without a redirect or notation creates its own audit trail problem.

The Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science, based on Acton's North Road, has research underway in archival data management that could inform territory policy, and the University of Canberra's Faculty of Arts and Design on Kirinari Street in Bruce has previously partnered with ACT cultural institutions on digitisation standards. Neither institution has a formal contract with the ACT government on this specific issue, but both represent local expertise that policymakers could draw on as they design a remediation framework.

Agencies that move first — establishing clear deduplication protocols and a designated master-record policy before the Light Rail 2B documentation repository goes live — will be better positioned when the next performance audit cycle begins. Those that wait will be managing the problem in public, with less time and more scrutiny.