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

ACT government agencies are facing a mounting backlog of duplicate digital images stored across departmental servers, and the decisions made over the coming quarter will determine whether Canberra's public records systems get a meaningful overhaul or kick the problem down the road again. The issue has quietly grown as agencies digitised paper records — a process that accelerated significantly after 2020 — leaving multiple copies of the same document scattered across shared drives, cloud storage and legacy on-premise servers simultaneously.

The timing matters. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, which covers the 2024–2027 period, set explicit targets for reducing data redundancy across the territory's directorates. With the midpoint of that strategy now passed, agencies are expected to demonstrate progress before the next budget cycle. Storage costs are not trivial: cloud data management contracts across the ACT Public Service run into the tens of millions of dollars annually, and duplicated image files — particularly high-resolution scans of planning documents, land titles and heritage records — are among the heaviest consumers of that capacity.

Where the pressure is falling hardest

Two institutions in particular are at the centre of the conversation. The ACT Government's Access Canberra service centre on Callam Street in Woden has accumulated years of digitised land and planning records, many scanned multiple times across different project phases. The Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, which holds heritage imagery and development application photographs, has similarly flagged the duplication issue in internal reviews seen by The Daily Canberra.

The Australian National University's Chifley Library precinct and the University of Canberra's Bruce campus library have each dealt with parallel challenges in their own digital repositories, particularly around photographic archives donated by researchers and government bodies. Neither institution is bound by the ACT Government's strategy, but both participate in the National Library of Australia's Trove infrastructure, which has its own deduplication protocols. The interaction between territory-held records and nationally aggregated systems is one of the unresolved questions heading into the second half of 2026.

The ACT's Chief Digital Officer function, housed within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, is understood to be scoping a territory-wide image deduplication framework. No formal consultation document has been released publicly as of July 4, 2026.

The decisions that can't wait much longer

Three specific choices are coming to a head. First, agencies must decide which master copy of a duplicated image is authoritative — the question sounds simple but gets complicated quickly when two directorates each claim version control over the same planning photograph from, say, the Gungahlin Town Centre redevelopment corridor along Hibberson Street.

Second, there is the question of what gets deleted permanently versus archived offline. Under the Territory Records Act 2002, certain records cannot be destroyed without approval from the Territory Records Office on Rudd Street in Civic. Getting that approval for bulk image deletions requires a formal disposal authorisation, a process that can take months when large volumes are involved.

Third, and most consequentially for the public service workforce that dominates Canberra's economy, is the staffing question. Automated deduplication tools can flag redundant files, but human review is still required for any image tied to a legal or heritage record. That work falls to records managers — a specialisation already under strain across the public service. The Australian Public Service Commission's most recent workforce data, published in December 2025, showed records management roles among the classifications with the highest vacancy rates in the ACT.

The practical timeline is tight. Budget submissions for 2027–28 are typically lodged with Treasury before October, meaning directorates that want dedicated funding for a deduplication program need a business case ready within weeks, not months. Agencies that miss that window will almost certainly be working from existing budgets — which, given current fiscal pressures, is unlikely to be enough to get the job done properly. The decisions made at the directorate level in July and August will either produce a real fix or produce another round of reports about a problem that keeps growing.