Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Thousands of duplicate images sitting across ACT government websites, Transport Canberra publications and territory agency portals are forcing a policy conversation that administrators have deferred for years. The question now is who pays to fix it, which systems take priority, and whether Canberra's public sector has the digital governance tools to do the job at all.

The issue has sharpened this year as the ACT government pushes toward a broader digital consolidation project under the Digital, Data and Technology Services directorate, based on London Circuit in the city centre. Duplicate imagery — stock photos, agency-branded graphics and accessibility-required alt-text images duplicated across multiple content management systems — inflates storage costs, complicates web accessibility audits required under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, and slows page load times on sites already under scrutiny from the ACT Auditor-General's office.

Why This Matters Now

Timing is everything. The ACT government's whole-of-government website refresh, which has been absorbing agencies from individual legacy platforms into a centralised GovCMS framework since 2023, is at a critical juncture. Several major directorates — including the ACT Health directorate and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development directorate — are mid-migration. When content moves from one system to another without a de-duplication step, duplicates compound. A single image of, say, the Molonglo Valley development corridor or a Gungahlin light-rail stop can exist simultaneously across six subdomain instances.

The Australian National University's digital collections team at the Chifley Library has dealt with a version of this problem since rolling out its research data repository in 2021. Their experience — auditing more than 40,000 digital assets and reducing storage overhead by restructuring metadata tagging — is now being cited informally by ACT government IT staff as a reference model, though no formal partnership has been announced.

At the University of Canberra's Bruce campus, the library and digital services division completed its own image rationalisation process in late 2024 as part of an internal CMS upgrade. The process revealed that approximately one-third of all image assets stored in the old system had at least one functional duplicate elsewhere in the same repository — a figure broadly consistent with what digital asset management consultants typically report for organisations that have grown organically without centralised governance.

The Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three specific decisions now sit in front of the ACT Digital, Data and Technology Services directorate. First: whether to mandate a de-duplication audit before any further agency migrations onto GovCMS proceed. Second: whether to procure a dedicated digital asset management platform — industry options range from around $30,000 to more than $200,000 annually depending on seat count and storage volume — or build audit capability into existing tools. Third: whether accessibility compliance officers within each directorate take ownership of image governance, or whether a central team at London Circuit absorbs that function.

Each choice carries a cost. A centralised model requires staffing that the territory budget, already under pressure heading into the 2026-27 budget cycle, may not easily absorb. A distributed model risks inconsistent outcomes across agencies, which is precisely how the duplicate problem emerged in the first place.

For Canberra's public service workforce — which makes up a disproportionately large share of the city's employed population — the practical stakes are mundane but real. Staff at agencies in Barton, Civic and Phillip spend time manually checking whether an image has already been uploaded before adding it to a web page, a workflow inefficiency that compounds across hundreds of users.

The next formal decision point arrives in September 2026, when the ACT government's digital services review is scheduled to report to the Legislative Assembly's standing committee on public accounts. What that report recommends — and whether the committee presses for a funded implementation plan rather than another framework document — will determine whether Canberra's duplicate image headache gets a real fix or simply a fresh coat of policy language.