How Canberra's Government Websites Got Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why It Took Years to Notice

Thousands of duplicate images sit buried inside the content management systems of ACT government and federal agency websites, the result of more than a decade of ad-hoc publishing practices, staff turnover, and a lack of centralised digital asset management across Canberra's sprawling public sector. The problem is not new. But the pressure to fix it is.

The issue matters now because several major digital renewal programs — including the ACT Government's ongoing work to consolidate agency websites under a unified framework, and federal initiatives tied to the Digital Transformation Agency's whole-of-government content standards — have put image duplication squarely in the path of progress. Bloated media libraries slow page load times, complicate accessibility compliance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and make it harder for communications teams to maintain consistent branding. For an organisation like the Australian Public Service, which employs roughly 170,000 people concentrated in and around the capital, the inefficiency compounds fast.

How the Stockpile Built Up

The roots of the problem trace back to the early 2010s, when Commonwealth agencies began migrating from bespoke intranets and static HTML sites to CMS platforms such as Drupal and WordPress. Each migration typically involved a bulk upload of image assets from previous systems, with little deduplication discipline applied. Staff uploading a photo of, say, the Australian War Memorial on Treloar Crescent, or a stock shot of Civic's City Walk precinct, would simply re-upload the file rather than search an existing media library that, in many cases, had no reliable search function to begin with.

The ACT Government's own digital estate compounded the issue differently. Multiple directorates — Transport Canberra, Access Canberra, the Canberra Institute of Technology — operated semi-independently on different CMS versions, each accumulating their own image libraries with no shared repository. A single photograph of light rail on Flemington Road, for instance, might exist in six or seven separate uploads across three directorates, each with different file names, different alt-text fields, and different compression settings.

By the time web managers began auditing these systems seriously — roughly from 2022 onward, as accessibility obligations tightened under Commonwealth Procurement Rules — some agency media libraries had grown to contain image duplication rates estimated by digital consultants at between 30 and 60 percent of total stored assets. Those figures are drawn from publicly available case study summaries presented at GovHack and public sector digital forums, not from any single government audit released to date.

The Cost of Inaction

Storage costs alone are a modest but real line item. More consequential is the accessibility gap. Images uploaded multiple times rarely carry consistent alternative text descriptions, which means screen-reader users navigating ACT or Commonwealth sites may encounter the same visual content described differently — or not at all — depending on which page they land on. The Australian Human Rights Commission has published guidance linking inconsistent alt-text to barriers for users with visual impairments, and web accessibility has featured in several ACT Legislative Assembly committee hearings over the past three years.

There is also a governance dimension. The Digital Transformation Agency published its Digital Service Standard in its current form in 2016, with subsequent updates encouraging agencies to consolidate and reuse content assets. But the standard is guidance, not a hard mandate with enforcement teeth. That gap between policy intention and operational reality is where duplicate images proliferated.

For communications staff at agencies based in Barton, Parkes, or the newer government office precincts in Brindabella Business Park near the airport, the practical consequence is mundane but time-consuming: hunting through hundreds of near-identical thumbnails to find the right version of an image before a publication deadline.

The path forward involves a combination of automated deduplication tooling — now built into newer versions of several major CMS platforms — and governance changes that assign clear ownership of shared image libraries. Several ACT directorates are understood to be piloting shared digital asset management approaches as part of broader website consolidation work scheduled to progress through the second half of 2026. Whether that work moves fast enough to meaningfully shrink the backlog before the next round of accessibility audits lands is the question now sitting on the desks of digital managers across the city.