Duplicate Images on Perth Government Websites: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Western Australia's state government agencies and local councils are sitting on a sprawling problem: thousands of duplicate images embedded across public-facing websites and digital platforms, many of them untagged, mislabelled or repeated so many times they are degrading both search performance and accessibility compliance. The issue has quietly grown alongside a rapid expansion of WA's digital infrastructure, and the decisions made in the next six to twelve months will determine whether agencies get ahead of it or face mandatory remediation orders from the Office of Digital Government.

The timing matters because the WA government committed in its 2025–26 state budget — handed down against the backdrop of a substantial iron ore–driven surplus — to accelerating the Connecting with Government digital services program. That program is pushing agencies toward consolidated content management systems, and duplicate imagery is one of the clearest early friction points. When two or more versions of the same photograph or graphic are stored under different file names across a shared asset library, accessibility tools can serve the wrong alt-text to screen readers, search indexing degrades, and storage costs compound at scale.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

The issue is particularly visible inside agencies managing high-volume public communications. The Department of Transport, which coordinates Metronet project updates across its Waterford-based communications hub, has published construction photography at each of the 72-plus Metronet station precincts over the past four years. Multiple rounds of contractor handovers and website migrations have left image libraries with overlapping files. The City of Perth, which refreshed its Hay Street and Murray Street digital wayfinding content in late 2024, encountered the same problem when consolidating assets after its website platform migration to a new cloud-based CMS.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage — headquartered on Victoria Avenue in the CBD — maintains mapping and aerial imagery banks that are particularly prone to duplication because the same drone captures are often submitted by multiple project proponents for overlapping precincts in growth corridors like Alkimos, Eglinton and Brabham. An audit of just one corridor's project files can surface dozens of near-identical images with different file names and conflicting metadata.

At the local government level, the City of Stirling and the City of Joondalup both flagged the problem in their respective digital strategy reviews tabled in the first half of 2026. Both councils are directly adjacent to defence precincts that have generated large volumes of construction and planning imagery associated with AUKUS-related Stirling Naval Base upgrades — imagery that has flowed through multiple public consultation portals and created parallel image libraries with no deduplication layer.

The Decisions That Will Define the Response

Three choices now sit in front of agency heads and chief digital officers. First: whether to run a manual audit or deploy automated deduplication software. Automated tools can cross-reference pixel hashes and flag near-duplicates in hours rather than months, but procurement of a whole-of-government licence through the State Purchasing Contract process typically takes between three and six months. Second: who owns the remediation. Under the Sharing and Enabling Electronic Records — SEER — framework, record-keeping obligations sit with individual agencies, but the Office of Digital Government has the authority to set platform standards. If ODG moves to mandate a single asset management standard across core agencies, the remediation workload shifts from voluntary to compulsory, with cost implications for agency budgets already stretched by the housing demand surge reshaping WA's planning pipeline.

Third, and most practically: what to do with the images themselves once duplicates are identified. Deletion is not always straightforward. Imagery tied to environmental approvals, heritage assessments along Perth's inner-northern corridors, or AUKUS-adjacent construction documentation may carry a mandatory retention period under State Records Act 2000 obligations, meaning duplicates cannot simply be purged — they must be archived and cross-referenced.

Agencies that begin structured audits before the end of the 2026 calendar year will be better placed when the Connecting with Government program's next compliance checkpoint arrives, expected in early 2027. Those that wait will likely face a much harder retrofit. The practical first step for any agency is a file-hash inventory of their current image library — a process that, for a mid-sized department, can typically be completed within four to six weeks using existing ICT resources.