ACT Government's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape What Comes Next

The ACT Government is facing a concrete decision point over how it manages thousands of duplicate image files sitting across its digital infrastructure — a problem that has quietly inflated storage costs and complicated records management for multiple directorates over several years. The question now is who decides what gets deleted, archived, or migrated, and on what timeline.

The issue has sharpened because the broader Australian public sector is under renewed pressure to modernise digital asset management. The National Archives of Australia, based in Mitchell, updated its digital preservation guidance in late 2024, and agencies at both the federal and territory level are expected to demonstrate compliance with records disposal frameworks. For the ACT, that pressure lands directly on the Chief Digital Officer's office within the ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions division.

Where the Backlog Lives — and Why It Matters Here

The duplication problem is not abstract. Government communications teams, planning directorates, and health agencies routinely publish images to public-facing websites, internal SharePoint environments, and archival systems — often without a single authoritative source. The ACT Planning directorate, which has been producing significant volumes of documentation related to the city's rezoning work under the 2023 District Strategies, is one area where image duplication across consultation documents has been noted internally as a records management concern.

Transport Canberra's light rail communications have generated similar volumes. Stage 2A materials — covering the extension from the city to Commonwealth Avenue — involve engineering diagrams, community consultation images, and renderings that exist across at least three separate publishing environments, according to procurement documents posted to the ACT Government's Tenders ACT portal. Rationalising those assets before Stage 2B planning documentation begins in earnest is one practical pressure point.

The financial stakes are real. Cloud storage pricing for government-grade infrastructure in Australia typically runs between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month depending on the provider and classification tier. Across a mid-sized government with tens of thousands of unmanaged image assets, that accumulates. The ACT Government's digital infrastructure is partly hosted through whole-of-government arrangements that feed into the broader Services Australia ecosystem, meaning inefficiencies compound at a territory level before they even reach Commonwealth cost-sharing calculations.

The Decision Framework and Who Holds It

Three decisions will define what happens next. First, the ACT Government needs to determine whether duplicate image remediation is handled agency by agency or through a centralised Digital, Data and Technology Solutions mandate — a governance question with budget implications either way. Second, it must set a disposal authority threshold: not all duplicate images are equal under the Territory Records Act 2002, and images attached to planning decisions or Ministerial correspondence carry different retention obligations than stock photography used in a media release.

Third, and most practically, a tool or process needs to be designated. The ACT Government has existing licensing arrangements with Microsoft 365, which includes Syntex and Purview compliance tools that can flag duplicate content — but deploying those capabilities requires deliberate configuration, not just a software licence renewal. That work has to be commissioned, scoped, and funded, likely through a supplementary budget measure or an existing digital transformation envelope.

For public servants in Gungahlin and Belconnen who work remotely and upload documents and images to shared drives daily, the downstream effect of a proper remediation program is faster search, cleaner version control, and less risk of publishing an outdated or superseded image in a public document. The ANU's College of Engineering and Computer Science, which has partnered with the ACT Government on digital capability projects before, has the research capacity to assist with automated classification — though any such arrangement would require a formal procurement or research partnership agreement.

The ACT Government has not publicly announced a timeline for addressing the duplication backlog. The next ACT Budget is scheduled for release in August 2026, and digital infrastructure line items will be closely watched by agencies waiting to see whether this particular problem gets a funded solution or another year on the to-do list.