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

Thousands of duplicate digital images — identical or near-identical files stored across multiple servers, shared drives and cloud platforms — have accumulated inside Canberra's federal and territory agencies over the past decade, creating a data management headache that IT auditors and records managers are now being asked to fix. The problem did not arrive overnight. It grew from a series of decisions, or non-decisions, made as government went digital faster than its filing habits could keep up.

The timing matters because the ACT Government's whole-of-government Digital Strategy, which set 2025 as a benchmark year for consolidated cloud storage across territory agencies, has passed without the expected rationalisation of legacy asset libraries. That means agencies heading into the 2026–27 budget cycle are carrying storage overheads they had planned to shed — a pressure point for a territory government already managing cost scrutiny on major infrastructure commitments including Light Rail Stage 2B to Woden.

How the Problem Built Up

The duplication issue has several distinct origins. When the ACT Government's shared services model was restructured under the Access Canberra umbrella from 2015 onward, agencies migrated files to new platforms without systematically decommissioning old ones. Photographs, graphic assets, scanned documents and communications imagery were copied rather than moved. Each machinery-of-government change — and there have been several since 2016 — created another layer, with incoming directorates inheriting image libraries from predecessors and then building their own alongside them.

At the federal level, the same pattern played out across departments headquartered in Barton, Parkes and Phillip. The Australian Public Service Commission's digital capability reviews, conducted periodically since 2019, have flagged unstructured data growth as a recurring concern, though the specific volume of duplicate image files across the service has not been publicly quantified in any single published audit.

University of Canberra researchers working with the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis have studied this phenomenon in the context of broader public sector records management. The core finding, consistent across comparable jurisdictions, is that migration events — moving from one content management system to another — are the single biggest driver of duplication. Canberra agencies have gone through at least three significant platform transitions in ten years: from legacy on-premise systems to early cloud environments, then to Microsoft 365 tenancies, and now toward consolidated SharePoint architectures.

Storage costs in hyperscale cloud environments have dropped substantially since 2015, which paradoxically made the problem worse. When storing an extra gigabyte cost almost nothing, there was no financial incentive to deduplicate. The reckoning comes later, in the form of governance risk — duplicate images mean outdated versions of ministerial portraits, superseded campaign assets and legally sensitive material sitting in accessible but unmanaged folders across directorates based in the Macarthur Avenue precinct in Barton and the London Circuit offices in the city.

What Agencies Are Now Being Asked to Do

The Digital, Data and Technology Solutions (DDTS) area within the ACT's Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate issued internal guidance in late 2025 directing agencies to conduct asset library audits as part of compliance with the updated Records Management Standard. That standard, revised in October 2025, specifically requires agencies to document and remediate duplicate digital assets before the end of the 2026–27 financial year.

The practical task is not trivial. A single medium-sized directorate can hold tens of thousands of image files accumulated over a decade of communications activity. Manual review is too slow; automated deduplication tools flag near-duplicates — such as slightly cropped versions of the same photograph — but require human judgment to resolve. Agencies without dedicated digital asset managers, which includes most smaller ACT bodies, are relying on generalist IT staff or contracted specialists.

For agencies, the clearest near-term action is to nominate a records owner for image libraries before the directorate's next internal audit cycle and to map which platforms — SharePoint, Teams channels, legacy network drives and any remaining Objective ECM folders — are holding active image assets. Agencies that have already completed a Microsoft 365 audit as part of the broader whole-of-government consolidation are in the best position to move quickly. Those that haven't are likely to find the process takes longer than the guidance currently anticipates.