ACT Government's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions Ahead

The ACT Government is facing a decision point on how it manages hundreds of thousands of duplicated images sitting across agency servers, shared drives and legacy content management systems — a problem that has quietly ballooned as departments expanded their digital communications work through the early 2020s. With a whole-of-government digital asset review scheduled for completion by September 30, agency heads are now working through options that carry real budget consequences.

The timing matters because the ACT's digital infrastructure contracts — including storage arrangements managed through Shared Services, the central procurement body based in Callam Offices in Woden — are due for renegotiation in the second half of this financial year. Decisions made now about deduplication standards, image retention schedules and procurement of a unified digital asset management platform will effectively lock in the government's approach for the next four to five years.

Canberra's public sector context makes this more complicated than it might be elsewhere. The ACT Government operates alongside dozens of federal agencies, and staff regularly move between territory and Commonwealth roles — carrying file-naming habits, shared folder structures and informal image libraries with them. Agencies such as Transport Canberra, which manages the light rail network, and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, which handles everything from Gungahlin rezoning documentation to heritage photography, have each built their own image repositories with minimal coordination.

What the Audit Is Likely to Find

Internal digital reviews in comparable jurisdictions have typically found duplication rates of between 30 and 60 percent across unmanaged government image libraries — meaning a significant share of stored files are exact or near-exact copies drawing on the same storage budget. The ACT Government's own Shared Services ICT division has flagged deduplication as a priority in its 2025-26 operational plan, a public document available through the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate. The cost of cloud storage has fallen sharply over the past decade, but the volume of government-generated image content has risen faster, and the administrative overhead of managing poorly catalogued archives is not trivial for a public service that employs roughly 22,000 people across the territory.

The Australian National University's Centre for Digital Humanities on Acton Peninsula has done related work cataloguing historical photographic collections and flagged, in published research, the risk that ad hoc deduplication — simply deleting apparent duplicates without a governed policy — can destroy archival value. A low-resolution thumbnail and a high-resolution master may look like duplicates to an automated tool but serve entirely different purposes in a public record.

The Decisions That Will Shape the Outcome

Three choices are now in front of agency CIOs and the Shared Services leadership. First, whether to adopt a centralised digital asset management platform — vendors have been pitching to government since at least early 2025 — or to build minimum interoperability standards that let agencies keep their own systems. Second, what the retention schedule should be: the ACT Government's Territory Records Act 2002 sets the legal floor, but agencies have discretion above that, and images accumulated during the construction of light rail Stage 1 along Flemington Road, for example, may have long-term heritage value not captured in current disposal authorities. Third, who pays for the remediation work itself, given that Shared Services operates on a cost-recovery model and individual directorates are already managing tight 2026-27 budget envelopes.

The practical next steps for anyone inside the ACT Public Service watching this unfold: check whether your directorate has submitted its asset register to the Shared Services audit by the July 31 deadline; flag any collections with potential archival significance to the Territory Records Office on Rudd Street in the city; and expect that any platform procurement decision will go to a procurement panel process, likely running through November, before a contract award early in 2027. The window to influence the policy design — through directorate submissions or consultation with the ACT's Chief Digital Officer — is open now, and it will not stay open long.