How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And What's Being Done About It

The problem did not arrive overnight. Across dozens of ACT government web properties — from the Access Canberra service portal to the Transport Canberra journey planner — digital teams are now grappling with a backlog of duplicate and mismatched images that accumulated through at least a decade of piecemeal content management decisions. The scale of the issue became harder to ignore in mid-2025, when the ACT Digital Services Division flagged image redundancy as a contributing factor in accessibility audit failures across several agency sites.

The timing matters. Federal and territory governments are under growing pressure to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 standard, with the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency setting compliance expectations for Commonwealth entities. For ACT public servants headquartered along London Circuit and Civic, that pressure filters down quickly — the territory government's own digital infrastructure runs on shared platforms that mirror federal requirements closely.

How the Duplication Built Up

The root cause is straightforward, even if the fix is not. When agencies migrated content from legacy systems — many running on platforms built before 2015 — image libraries were often bulk-imported without deduplication checks. A photograph of the Molonglo Valley development used in a 2017 planning update might exist in three separate folders under different filenames, each uploaded by a different team member across different financial years. The same dynamic played out at statutory authorities including the ACT Planning Authority and at research institutions such as the Australian National University, which manages one of the largest public-facing web presences in the capital.

Content teams were rarely given the resources to do proper audits. A 2024 review of digital staffing levels across ACT government directorates — referenced in budget estimates hearings before the ACT Legislative Assembly's standing committee on public accounts — noted that most directorates ran web content functions with fewer than three dedicated staff. With high turnover common among public service digital roles in Canberra, institutional knowledge of what was already uploaded, and where, eroded quickly.

The University of Canberra's Centre for Communication and Media Research documented similar patterns in a 2023 study of government content management practices across Australian jurisdictions, finding that image asset governance was among the least-resourced areas of public sector digital operations nationally. The study did not name specific ACT agencies but drew on fieldwork conducted in the capital.

The Practical Cost for Canberra Users

Duplicate images are not merely a tidy-desk problem. Redundant files inflate page weight, slowing load times on government sites accessed by residents on lower-bandwidth connections in suburbs such as Tuggeranong and parts of Belconnen where fixed-line infrastructure remains patchy. More critically, when the same image appears under multiple filenames, alt-text descriptions — the written labels that screen readers use for vision-impaired users — frequently differ or are missing entirely on the duplicates. That creates an inconsistent, sometimes broken experience for users relying on assistive technology.

The ACT government's Disability Strategy 2025-2029, tabled in the Legislative Assembly in early 2025, commits the territory to measurable improvements in digital accessibility. Image management is not called out by name in the strategy, but accessibility advocates have pointed to duplicate and unlabelled images as one of the most common barriers identified during community consultations held at venues including the Belconnen Community Centre last year.

Fixing the problem requires more than a one-time cleanup. Digital teams are now being advised to implement automated deduplication tools at the point of content upload — several federal agencies have trialled hash-based image matching since 2024 — and to establish clearer naming conventions enforced through content management system workflows. For the ACT government, which is mid-way through a platform consolidation project targeting completion by late 2027, the opportunity to embed those practices into the new environment exists, but only if resourcing follows. Without dedicated staffing to govern image libraries on an ongoing basis, the same duplication will accumulate again within a few years. The question for Canberra's digital bureaucracy is whether it treats this as infrastructure — and funds it accordingly.