How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up With a Duplicate Image Problem — And What It's Costing Them

Thousands of duplicate photographs, graphics and scanned documents are clogging the digital storage systems of ACT government agencies and Commonwealth departments clustered along Canberra's parliamentary triangle, creating redundancy costs that IT managers have been flagging internally for at least three years. The problem, long treated as a low-priority housekeeping matter, has moved up the agenda as storage contracts come up for renegotiation and agencies face tighter capital budgets heading into the 2026-27 financial year.

The issue did not emerge overnight. It is the accumulated result of a decade of rapid digital expansion, successive machinery-of-government changes that merged and split agencies, and the mass shift to remote working arrangements during the COVID-19 period, when staff uploaded, re-uploaded and shared files across platforms with little centralised oversight. Every time an agency restructured — and there were at least four significant ACT public service restructures between 2018 and 2024 — digital asset libraries were migrated rather than audited, meaning duplicate files moved with them intact.

Where the Problem Took Root

The ACT Government's Shared Services directorate, based on Constitution Avenue in Reid, manages digital infrastructure for a range of territory agencies. Sources familiar with the directorate's operations — speaking in their professional capacity and not authorised to be named — have described image deduplication as a known backlog item, though the directorate has not made any public statement about the scale or cost of the issue. The Australian National University, on Acton Peninsula, faces a parallel challenge: its library and research data systems host millions of assets accumulated across decades of academic publication, and IT staff have spent considerable effort since at least 2022 running deduplication processes across research image repositories.

The University of Canberra, whose main campus sits on Kirinari Street in Bruce, conducted a digital asset audit as part of a broader systems review in 2023. The specific findings of that review have not been publicly released, but the exercise was prompted in part by storage costs that had grown faster than enrolment numbers — a pattern common across Australian universities as cloud storage pricing fluctuated through 2022 and 2023.

For Commonwealth public servants — who make up a substantial share of Canberra's workforce and are spread across precincts in Barton, Woden and Civic — the problem intersects with whole-of-government digital policy. The Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency has pushed agencies toward standardised content management platforms, but legacy systems remain in use across dozens of departments, and each platform tends to store its own copy of shared assets rather than drawing from a central library.

Why It Matters Now

Cloud storage is not cheap at government scale. Commercial rates for enterprise cloud storage have shifted significantly since 2020, and multi-year contracts signed during the early pandemic period are expiring. Agencies renegotiating those contracts are, for the first time in several years, being asked to justify exactly how much storage they need — and why. That scrutiny is exposing the duplicate image problem in ways that routine IT operations did not.

The practical consequences range from inflated storage invoices to slower search performance inside content management systems, to genuine compliance risks when outdated versions of official images — say, an older map of Gungahlin's suburb boundaries or a superseded organisational chart — remain findable and potentially publishable alongside the current, correct version.

Addressing the problem requires more than running an automated deduplication tool. Agencies need to establish which version of a duplicated image is the authoritative one, archive or delete the rest, and update any internal links that point to the deleted files. For large agencies, that is a months-long process requiring dedicated resourcing.

The practical advice for anyone managing digital assets inside an ACT or Commonwealth agency right now is straightforward: before the next storage contract renewal lands on a manager's desk, it is worth requesting an asset audit from whichever directorate or vendor manages the content system. Waiting until a contract negotiation is already underway leaves little room to use the findings as leverage. The agencies that started auditing early — even informally — are the ones best positioned to argue for smaller, cheaper storage allocations in the rounds ahead.