How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Buried in Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing Them

Federal agencies headquartered along Northbourne Avenue and in the Barton precinct are sitting on enormous stockpiles of duplicate digital images — photographs, scanned documents, graphic assets — spread across disconnected servers, SharePoint instances, and legacy content management systems accumulated over more than two decades of digital expansion. The problem is not new. But the push to fix it has reached a tipping point in 2026, driven by storage cost pressures, the Albanese government's ongoing public service consolidation agenda, and new procurement rules that took effect from 1 January this year under the revised Commonwealth Procurement Rules framework.

The issue matters now because the cost of doing nothing has become measurable in a way it wasn't three years ago. Cloud storage prices have fallen, but the volume of duplicated assets has outpaced those savings. IT managers across the Australian Public Service have flagged digital asset management as a priority remediation area in preparation for the government's broader data and digital strategy refresh, which the Department of Finance has been coordinating from its offices in One Canberra Avenue, Forrest.

How the Duplication Built Up

The mechanics are straightforward enough. When the APS absorbed and restructured agencies through machinery-of-government changes — there were at least four significant restructures between 2019 and 2024 — staff migrated files manually, often without deduplication protocols. A photograph used in a ministerial brief would be saved locally, uploaded to a shared drive, emailed as an attachment, and then re-uploaded again when the brief was converted to a web article. Repeat that process across thousands of employees at, say, the Department of Health and Aged Care in Sirius Building on Furneaux Street, or the Department of Education on Marcus Clarke Street in the City, and the redundancy compounds rapidly.

The Australian National University's digital curation research group has studied this pattern in the public sector context, and the problem is well-documented in international literature: organisations without enforced metadata standards and centralised asset repositories generate duplicate rates that can exceed 30 percent of total digital storage within five years of a major platform migration. The ACT government has faced the same issue at a smaller scale within its own directorates, particularly following the transition of multiple agencies onto the Shared Services ICT platform between 2018 and 2022.

Libraries ACT, operating from the Civic library on London Circuit, and the ACT State Records office have both grappled with duplicate image sets inherited from earlier digitisation programs. When the ACT government digitised historical planning and land records held at the repository in Mitchell, duplicate image files were identified as a material problem requiring a dedicated remediation project, according to publicly available project documentation from the ACT Directorate of Territory Records.

What Remediation Actually Looks Like

The standard approach now involves three steps: automated deduplication scanning using hash-matching software, human-reviewed metadata reconciliation, and then consolidation into a single-source-of-truth digital asset management system. The Commonwealth's Digital Transformation Agency, based in Constitution Avenue in Reid, has published guidance recommending agencies adopt this workflow before any cloud migration. The guidance does not mandate a specific vendor but sets minimum standards for audit trails and version control.

For smaller ACT government bodies, the practical entry point is often a managed service contract through the ACT Government's Whole of Government ICT panel, which was last refreshed in late 2024 and includes providers with specific digital asset management capability. Agencies that have already gone through the process — including one directorate that completed a full image library audit ahead of its move to a new building in Dickson in early 2025 — report that the initial scan phase typically surfaces duplication rates higher than internal estimates had suggested.

The immediate next step for most agencies is an internal audit. IT managers are being advised to run deduplication scans before the end of the current financial year, ahead of budget submissions due in September that will need to account for storage rationalisation. For public servants in Gungahlin and Belconnen who work in offices that were set up during the rapid headcount expansions of 2020 and 2021, it may be the first time their agency's image holdings have ever been systematically mapped. The time to start is now, not at the next machinery-of-government reshuffle.