Duplicate Images Are Costing Canberra Agencies More Than Anyone Admits: Here Are the Numbers

Canberra's public sector has a data hoarding problem, and duplicate images sit at the centre of it. Across ACT government agencies and the federal departments that crowd the Barton and Parkes precincts, digital asset libraries have swelled to sizes that were unimaginable a decade ago — and a significant share of that storage is eaten up by identical or near-identical image files saved multiple times under different names, in different folders, by different teams.

The timing matters. The ACT government's digital modernisation agenda, pushed through a series of budget commitments since 2023, has accelerated the migration of legacy file systems onto centralised cloud infrastructure. That migration has exposed, in sometimes embarrassing detail, exactly how badly duplicated content has accumulated. Agencies that assumed their storage costs would fall after moving to the cloud have instead found bills holding stubbornly high — partly because duplicate image data migrated right alongside everything else.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Industry benchmarks from digital asset management research consistently put duplicate and redundant files at between 30 and 40 per cent of total unstructured data held by large public-sector organisations. For a mid-sized ACT government directorate storing, say, 50 terabytes of communications and archival material, that translates to somewhere between 15 and 20 terabytes of storage that delivers no unique informational value. At commercial cloud storage rates that hovered around AUD $0.023 per gigabyte per month in mid-2026, a 15-terabyte duplicate burden costs roughly $345 every month — or more than $4,100 a year — for a single directorate doing nothing except keeping redundant copies of files it already has.

Multiply that across the ACT public service's dozens of directorates and the federal agencies headquartered along Commonwealth Avenue and King Edward Terrace, and the cumulative waste becomes a budget line worth scrutinising. The Australian National Audit Office has flagged data governance gaps in federal agencies in successive reports, and while those reports focus on broader information management failures, duplicate asset accumulation is a documented sub-problem within that category.

The University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, based on the Bruce campus, has done adjacent work tracking how government communications teams manage visual content over electoral cycles. The pattern researchers have described in published work points to the same structural issue: image libraries grow fastest during election campaigns and major infrastructure announcements — precisely the periods when multiple staff download, rename, and re-upload the same photography from events held at places like the National Arboretum in Stromlo or the light rail depot in Mitchell.

Local Workflows, Local Consequences

The practical consequences fall on the public servants doing the day-to-day work. A communications officer at a Civic-based directorate trying to locate the approved version of a ministerial photograph can spend meaningful time navigating folders full of files named IMG_4421_final_v2_APPROVED_USE_THIS.jpg and variants thereof. That is not an abstract problem. It is a daily friction cost that compounds across a workforce of roughly 23,000 ACT public servants, plus tens of thousands of Commonwealth employees based in Canberra.

The ACT government's Digital Strategy, updated in 2025, nominates improved data quality as a priority. The strategy references deduplication tools and metadata standards without committing to specific reduction targets — a gap that digital asset specialists argue undermines accountability. Several federal agencies have piloted automated deduplication software through the Australian Signals Directorate's whole-of-government procurement arrangements, with early results suggesting storage reductions of 20 to 35 per cent in targeted libraries.

For agencies that have not yet run a deduplication audit, the practical starting point is a file-level hash comparison across storage environments — a process that can be completed on a standard server over a weekend and requires no specialist vendor contract. The National Archives of Australia, whose Parkes Place facility sets the benchmark for government records management, publishes guidance on exactly this kind of remediation under its Digital Continuity policy framework. The guidance has been available since 2021. The agencies that have acted on it are spending less. The ones that have not are paying, month after month, to store the same photograph twice.