How Canberra's Government Agencies Fell Into a Duplicate Image Problem — and What It Cost Them

Canberra's public sector has spent the better part of a decade building out digital communications infrastructure, and somewhere along the way it created a problem nobody planned for: thousands of duplicate images sitting across dozens of agency websites, intranets and digital asset libraries, many of them unlicensed, mislabelled or simply redundant. The reckoning for that accumulated disorder is happening now.

The issue matters partly because of scale. The Australian Public Service spans more than 150 agencies, a significant number of which maintain independent digital publishing operations out of offices in Barton, Phillip, Woden and the broader inner south. Each of those operations built its own workflows, its own folder structures, its own assumptions about image rights. When a staff photographer at one agency shot an aerial of Lake Burley Griffin in 2018, that image could — and often did — find its way into the asset libraries of three or four other agencies without any formal licensing trail to follow.

A Problem Decades in the Making

The structural origins go back to the early 2000s, when whole-of-government digital strategy was still a loose concept. The Digital Transformation Agency, established in 2015 and headquartered on Mort Street in the city, has progressively pushed for standardised content management approaches across federal government, but uptake has been uneven. Agencies with large communications budgets — Services Australia, the Department of Health, the Department of Education — built sophisticated digital asset management systems. Smaller bodies often relied on shared drives and informal conventions.

The ACT Government's own digital estate compounded the issue at the Territory level. The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate manages a web presence that touches everything from Access Canberra service portals to tourism promotion, and a 2024 internal audit — details of which were referenced in budget papers tabled in the ACT Legislative Assembly — flagged duplicate and unverified digital content as a risk category requiring remediation work.

By 2025, the practical consequences were becoming harder to ignore. Several agencies had received correspondence from stock image licensing bodies over images used without current authorisation — images that had been copied between internal systems so many times that the original licence documentation was effectively lost. Legal exposure on unlicensed commercial imagery can run to several thousand dollars per image under Australian copyright law, and for agencies running websites with hundreds of stock photos, the potential liability added up quickly.

What the Cleanup Actually Looks Like

The remediation process, now underway across multiple agencies, involves running automated detection tools against existing content management systems to flag pixel-level and metadata matches. The Australian National University's College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics has done relevant research in this space, and at least one federal agency has engaged ANU researchers through its consulting arm to advise on detection methodology — though the specific contractual details are not publicly available.

For the ACT Government, the University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research has also been involved in broader conversations about government digital asset stewardship, an area where the Territory's relatively compact public service has some advantages over the federal behemoth.

The Gungahlin and Belconnen town centre redevelopment projects — both of which generated substantial photographic documentation between 2019 and 2024 — are frequently cited within digital communications circles as examples of where asset duplication became acute. Construction progress images taken for planning records ended up in media libraries, community newsletters and ministerial briefing documents, often with conflicting attribution.

For public servants working in communications roles, the practical advice from agency digital leads has been consistent: do not copy images between systems without verifying the original licence, and flag any image that cannot be traced to a single authoritative source. The Digital Transformation Agency's content design resources, available via its website, include guidance on image rights that has been updated twice since 2023. Agencies yet to conduct an internal audit of their digital asset libraries are being encouraged to begin that process before the end of the 2026–27 financial year, when whole-of-government digital standards are expected to be reviewed.