How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Thousands of duplicate images are cluttering the ACT Government's digital infrastructure, costing storage budget and slowing load times across agency websites that public servants and Canberrans rely on daily. The problem did not appear overnight — it accumulated across more than a decade of rushed content migrations, departmental restructures, and the kind of short-term digital publishing decisions that made sense in the moment and became someone else's problem later.

The issue matters now because the ACT Government is mid-way through a consolidation of its public-facing digital platforms. The whole-of-government web strategy, which the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions (DDTS) directorate has been driving since at least 2023, is forcing agencies to audit their content management systems before migrating to unified platforms. That audit work is exposing just how bad the duplication problem has become.

How Canberra Arrived at This Point

The roots go back to the machinery-of-government changes that followed ACT budget cycles through the 2010s. Each time a directorate was renamed, split, or merged — Transport Canberra is one clear example, carved out of what was formerly the Transport and Municipal Services Directorate — web content was typically copied rather than moved cleanly. Images were re-uploaded to new content management system instances instead of being linked from a central asset library. By the time the Access Canberra service consolidation gathered pace around 2019 and 2020, multiple versions of the same banner graphics, headshot photographs, and infographic files had been duplicated across sites run by at least half a dozen directorates.

The pandemic-era sprint to put services online made it worse. Teams publishing COVID-19 information quickly did not stop to check whether a map of Canberra Health Services facilities or a photograph of the Woden Health Centre on Corinna Street had already been uploaded three times in three separate folders. Speed was the priority. Storage was cheap. The duplication was invisible to the end user, so it stayed invisible to decision-makers too.

By 2024, industry benchmark data on government content management systems — published by the Digital Transformation Agency at the Commonwealth level — pointed to duplication rates of between 30 and 40 per cent in large public sector web estates as a recurring finding across Australian jurisdictions. The ACT's estate, while smaller than New South Wales or Victoria, is proportionally complex because so many agencies maintain separate sub-sites alongside the main act.gov.au domain.

What the Clean-Up Actually Involves

DDTS is now requiring directorates to use image deduplication tooling as part of the platform migration workflow. The practical burden falls on communications and digital teams within agencies — staff at places like the Canberra Institute of Technology in Bruce, the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate on Constitution Avenue, and Transport Canberra and City Services — who must review flagged duplicates, confirm which file is canonical, and retire the rest before content is migrated forward.

That is not a trivial task. A single directorate website can hold several thousand image assets accumulated over eight to ten years. Staff must distinguish between genuinely identical files — the same JPEG uploaded twice — and near-duplicates, such as a cropped version of an image that might serve a different accessibility or layout purpose. Getting that wrong risks breaking pages that are still in active use.

The process has a direct cost in staff time. Communications teams in the ACT public service are not large. Many sit at three to five full-time equivalents for an entire directorate's digital output, which means the deduplication audit is competing with day-to-day publishing work during a period when housing policy, light rail stage 2 communications, and budget announcements are all generating high content volumes.

Agencies that complete their audits earliest will move onto the consolidated platform first, giving their web content a performance benefit — faster page loads, reduced maintenance overhead — while those still working through backlogs remain on older infrastructure. The practical advice for public servants managing digital content right now is straightforward: establish a single source of truth for image assets before uploading anything new, and treat every re-upload as a question worth asking rather than a reflex action. The shortcut that created this problem is the same shortcut that will extend it.