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

Federal agencies headquartered in Canberra are sitting on digital asset libraries so cluttered with duplicate images that some departments are paying cloud storage bills for tens of thousands of files they cannot identify, locate owners for, or safely delete. The problem did not arrive overnight. It accumulated across roughly a decade of uncoordinated content publishing, and it is now forcing a reckoning across the public service.

The timing matters. The Australian Public Service Commission has been pushing agencies toward consolidated digital infrastructure since at least 2022, and the federal government's hosting certification framework — administered through the Australian Signals Directorate — has added pressure on departments to audit what they actually hold before migrating workloads to certified cloud environments. Duplicate image stores are a direct obstacle to clean migration, and clean migration has a deadline attached to it.

How the Problem Accumulated

Three overlapping forces drove the duplication crisis. First, the 2018-to-2020 wave of federal website consolidations onto the australia.gov.au and digital.gov.au platforms saw content teams at agencies on Northbourne Avenue and in the parliamentary triangle upload images without referencing any shared asset register. Teams at the Department of Finance on King Edward Terrace and at Services Australia's Centenary House location each maintained separate content management systems with no cross-referencing tools. The same hero photograph of Parliament House, for instance, might exist in four slightly different crops across three separate SharePoint tenancies.

Second, the COVID-19 period between March 2020 and late 2021 accelerated the problem sharply. Communications teams across the ACT public service were publishing health updates, grant announcements and service changes at a pace that left no room for asset management discipline. The National Capital Authority, which manages the Parliamentary Zone, and the ACT Government's Access Canberra online portal both saw dramatic spikes in content output during that window. Image libraries grew faster than any governance framework could track.

Third, the growth of Canberra's outer suburbs — particularly Gungahlin and Belconnen — produced a parallel problem at the ACT government level. As the ACT expanded suburb-profile pages, planning documents and community engagement portals for new developments along the Gungahlin town centre corridor and around the Belconnen Arts Centre precinct, local communications officers duplicated stock photography and aerial imagery without a centralised tagging system to flag what already existed.

What Duplicate Images Actually Cost

Storage costs alone are not the primary concern, though they are real. A more significant liability is the copyright and licensing exposure. Many images held in government digital asset libraries were licensed for single-use or for a defined period. When duplicates propagate across systems without tracking, agencies lose the ability to confirm whether a given image is still within its licence window. The Digital Transformation Agency flagged this risk category in its 2023 guidance on content governance, noting that unmanaged asset libraries represent both a financial and a legal exposure for Commonwealth entities.

The ACT Government's own digital team, based in Civic, has been trialling automated duplicate-detection tooling since early 2025 as part of its broader website consolidation project. The process involves hashing image files to identify identical or near-identical copies regardless of filename, a technique that has revealed duplication rates of 30 percent or higher in some departmental folders, according to publicly available documentation from similar audits conducted by the New South Wales Government's digital teams.

For agencies planning to move to compliant cloud infrastructure before the ASD hosting certification deadlines, the practical advice from digital governance specialists is consistent: run a deduplication audit before migration, not after. Migrating a bloated, unaudited library into a certified environment does not solve the problem — it just makes it more expensive to fix later. Agencies using platforms such as the Department of Finance's whole-of-government content tools should cross-reference asset registers against licence documentation before any bulk transfer is approved. The work is unglamorous, but the alternative — discovering mid-migration that thousands of images have no clear ownership or licensing record — is the kind of compliance problem that lands on a deputy secretary's desk at the worst possible moment.