How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and Why It's Taken Years to Fix

Thousands of duplicate image files are clogging the content management systems of ACT government agencies and federal departments headquartered in Canberra, a problem that has compounded quietly since the mid-2010s and is now forcing expensive remediation projects across the public service precinct.

The issue matters now because several agencies are mid-way through major digital transformation programs. The Digital Transformation Agency, based in Canberra's CBD on Mort Street in Braddon, has been pressing departments to migrate legacy sites onto standardised platforms ahead of accessibility compliance deadlines. That migration process is exposing the scale of the duplication for the first time in a systematic way.

How the Stockpile Grew

The roots of the problem stretch back to 2015 and 2016, when Australian government agencies began a first wave of website consolidation under the gov.au framework. Staff at agencies ranging from the Department of Finance to smaller statutory bodies were given short deadlines to move content across to new platforms. Under time pressure, content editors routinely re-uploaded images already sitting elsewhere in the system rather than searching for existing assets. A single ministerial headshot or a stock photograph of Parliament House on Capital Hill could end up saved under a dozen different file names across the same site.

Turnover made it worse. The ACT public service and the federal public service both draw heavily from the same workforce pool in suburbs like Gungahlin and Tuggeranong. When staff moved between agencies — a common career path in Canberra — they took working habits with them but not institutional knowledge of what was already in a given system. Each new team member defaulted to uploading fresh copies of images rather than navigating unfamiliar asset libraries.

The Australian National University's 3A Institute, which has researched digital systems governance, and the University of Canberra's News and Media Research Centre have both pointed in separate published work to the broader problem of what researchers call "content debt" in public sector digital infrastructure — the slow accumulation of unmanaged files that creates downstream costs.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage costs are the obvious line item, but they are not the main concern. The deeper problem is accessibility compliance. Under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, images must carry accurate alternative text descriptions. When the same image exists in a system under multiple file names, there is no guarantee that all instances carry correct or consistent alt-text. An audit of one mid-sized ACT government site conducted as part of a 2024 accessibility review found more than 1,400 image files where duplicates could be identified, with alt-text inconsistencies across matched pairs in roughly 30 percent of cases. Australia's Disability Discrimination Act 1992 applies to government websites, giving that figure legal as well as administrative weight.

The cost of remediation is not small. Digital agencies working with Canberra-based government clients have quoted project fees ranging from $40,000 to well over $150,000 for a full image audit, deduplication, and alt-text review on a site of moderate complexity, depending on the size of the asset library and the age of the CMS. For larger departments running multiple sites — some of which have been accreting content since the early 2000s — the figure climbs further.

The ACT government's own digital services team, operating out of offices in the Civic precinct, has been working through a staged asset review across service.act.gov.au and associated agency sites since late 2024. That program is ongoing.

For agencies now facing similar clean-ups, the practical path forward is a content audit before any further migration work — not after. Running a hash-based deduplication check across all image assets before transferring them to a new platform prevents the problem from being baked into the replacement system. Several vendors now offer automated tools that integrate with common government CMS platforms including Squiz Matrix and GovCMS, both of which are in use across Canberra's public sector. Starting that process before the next Digital Transformation Agency compliance checkpoint, expected in the second half of 2026, would avoid the remediation bill arriving at the same time as other platform upgrade costs.