How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and Why It Took This Long to Fix

Across the ACT government's network of public-facing websites, the same photograph of the Australian War Memorial on Anzac Parade appears, by some internal estimates, dozens of times under different file names, stored in separate content management systems, burning server space and degrading page-load times for users in Gungahlin, Belconnen and everywhere in between. It is a small but telling symptom of a much larger structural problem that digital administrators have been quietly flagging for the better part of a decade.

The issue matters now because the ACT government's ongoing consolidation of its digital infrastructure — part of a broader Digital Strategy refresh being worked through by the ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate — has surfaced just how deep the duplication problem runs. With the federal government simultaneously pushing agencies toward the australia.gov.au common platform framework, Canberra's twin layers of government are being forced to confront legacy publishing habits at the same time.

How the Duplication Problem Built Up

The roots go back to the mid-2000s, when individual ACT directorates — Health, Education, Transport Canberra, and others — each built or commissioned their own websites with little cross-agency coordination. Every team uploaded its own asset library. When a communications officer in one directorate needed a stock image of the light rail stop at Civic, they uploaded a fresh copy rather than pulling from a shared repository that, in many cases, simply did not exist. The same dynamic played out across federal departments clustered along the parliamentary triangle, from the Department of Finance on Treasury Place to the larger agencies in Barton and Tuggeranong.

By the time the National Archives of Australia began pushing digital recordkeeping reforms more aggressively around 2018, the duplication was already institutional habit. Content management platforms including older versions of Squiz Matrix and various WordPress installations had been layered on top of one another through machinery-of-government changes. When directorates merged or split — as happened several times in the ACT between 2016 and 2022 — image libraries were frequently copied wholesale rather than rationalised, because rationalising them required time and budget that project teams rarely had.

The Australian National University's 3A Institute, based on the Acton campus, has published research on government data architecture that touches on exactly this kind of systemic inefficiency, noting that the cost is rarely visible in any single line item but accumulates across storage contracts, licensing fees for duplicate stock imagery, and accessibility remediation when the same image is tagged inconsistently across platforms.

What the Audit Numbers Suggest

A 2024 benchmarking exercise by the Digital Transformation Agency — publicly referenced in its annual report for that financial year — found that Australian government websites collectively held significant volumes of duplicate or near-duplicate digital assets, contributing to bloated content management overheads. The ACT government's own internal review, referenced in budget estimates hearings in May 2025, identified image duplication as a contributing factor in page-performance scores that sat below the national government average on Google's Core Web Vitals metrics.

Storage is not free. Cloud hosting contracts for mid-sized government content platforms typically run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and image assets — particularly high-resolution photography used in campaigns for programs like the Suburban Land Agency's development releases in Molonglo Valley or Transport Canberra's active travel promotions — are among the largest files in any CMS library. Duplicating them multiplies that cost without multiplying value.

The practical fix, now being implemented in stages, centres on establishing a single shared digital asset management system that all ACT government publishers draw from rather than upload to separately. Federal agencies are being directed toward similar shared repositories under guidance updated by the Digital Transformation Agency in late 2025. For communications teams working out of offices on London Circuit or Macquarie Street in Barton, the shift means retraining workflows that have been in place for years. Agencies that complete the migration by the end of the 2026–27 financial year are expected to see measurable reductions in both storage costs and the time spent by web administrators manually deduplicating asset libraries during site audits — a task that, until now, has largely fallen to junior staff with no automated tooling to help them.