How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Why Fixing It Took Years

ACT government digital teams have spent much of 2025 and the first half of 2026 quietly working through a problem that built up over more than a decade: thousands of duplicate images embedded across agency websites, clogging content management systems, breaking accessibility compliance, and making page load times measurably worse for residents trying to access services from Tuggeranong to Gungahlin.

The issue matters now because the ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, which committed agencies to WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards by December 2025, made duplicate imagery a compliance liability rather than just a housekeeping annoyance. When the same photograph is uploaded separately by three different content editors, it frequently arrives with three different alt-text tags — or none at all — meaning screen readers used by people with vision impairments deliver inconsistent or broken descriptions of the same content.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to roughly 2012–2014, when agencies including Access Canberra, the ACT Health Directorate, and Transport Canberra migrated content onto centralised content management platforms without a shared digital asset library. Each directorate maintained its own folder structures. Staff turned over. Institutional memory about what images already existed dissolved.

By the time the Australian National University's Centre for Digital Humanities published a 2023 analysis of public-sector web infrastructure practices in Australia, researchers had identified asset duplication as one of the five most common structural faults in government CMS deployments — alongside broken internal links, outdated metadata schemas, inconsistent heading hierarchies, and orphaned pages. The ACT's situation was not unique, but the territory's relatively small digital workforce — spread across offices in Civic, Dickson, and the Woden Town Centre precinct — meant fewer people were available to catch and correct the drift.

Federal agencies headquartered in Barton and Parkes faced related problems. The Digital Transformation Agency, based in Canberra's inner north, had been warning since at least 2021 that decentralised image management was creating both performance and accessibility gaps across the whole-of-government web estate. Page weight from redundant image files was one factor that contributed to slow load speeds — a particular frustration for residents in outer suburbs like Belconnen and Molonglo where fixed-line broadband coverage has historically been patchier than in the inner city.

The Practical Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage is not the primary cost driver, but it is a visible one. A typical mid-sized ACT agency website carries somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 image files in its media library; independent audits conducted for similar-scale state government sites in New South Wales have found duplication rates of 20 to 35 percent in libraries that have never been systematically reviewed. Applying even the lower end of that range to ACT government platforms suggests tens of thousands of redundant files sitting across shared servers.

The compliance stakes sharpened in November 2025 when the ACT Government's Office of the Chief Digital Officer issued updated web publishing guidelines requiring all new and substantially updated content to pass automated accessibility checks before publication. Duplicate images without consistent alt-text attributes fail those checks. Agencies that could not demonstrate compliance risked having pages flagged in the territory's public accessibility monitoring dashboard — a dashboard that is itself publicly visible at act.gov.au.

For digital teams at organisations like the Canberra Institute of Technology and the University of Canberra, which operate under separate but related web governance frameworks, the ACT government's tightening of standards created its own pressure to audit and consolidate image libraries before the end of the 2025–26 financial year.

The practical pathway forward involves three overlapping steps that agencies are now working through: running automated duplicate-detection tools against existing media libraries, establishing a single shared DAM — digital asset management — system across directorates, and retraining content editors on upload protocols. The Shared Services ICT division, which supports multiple ACT government directorates from its operations in Canberra's inner south, is expected to publish revised content governance guidelines before the end of the September 2026 quarter. Whether agencies meet that timeline will depend heavily on how quickly staff can be pulled from other project backlogs — a perennial constraint for a public service already stretched by light rail stage 2 project communications and housing affordability policy work.