How Melbourne's Councils Ended Up Paying Twice for the Same Public Art: The Duplicate Image Problem Explained

Melbourne's municipal councils have quietly spent years licensing the same stock photographs multiple times over, a practice that has drawn renewed scrutiny from the Victorian Auditor-General's Office as local government budgets tighten ahead of the 2026–27 financial year. The problem is not new, but the scale of duplication has grown sharply as councils expanded their digital communications teams following the pandemic.

The issue matters now because ratepayer pressure is acute. The City of Melbourne is finalising its annual budget, and inner-north councils including Yarra and Moreland — now rebranded as Merri-bek — are each facing infrastructure funding gaps at the same time as their communications departments are sitting on overlapping digital image libraries running into thousands of files. For councils that publicly champion fiscal discipline, the optics are difficult.

How the Libraries Grew Out of Control

The roots of the problem stretch back to roughly 2018, when Victorian councils accelerated their shift toward in-house content production. Teams hired during that period often built their own image libraries using departmental credit cards, bypassing central procurement. When those staff moved on, the libraries stayed — orphaned folders on shared drives at council offices from Swanston Street to Footscray's Nicholson Street hub.

By 2021, as remote-working arrangements forced councils onto cloud-based systems, platforms such as the state government's Vic Gov digital asset portal struggled to absorb local-government content. Councils did not consistently migrate their existing libraries. Instead, new subscriptions were opened alongside old ones. The City of Port Phillip, for example, ran parallel contracts with at least two commercial image providers simultaneously for a period spanning the 2022 and 2023 financial years, according to procurement records tabled at the council's public audit committee.

The Victorian Local Government Association flagged the issue in guidance circulated to member councils in late 2023, recommending a consolidated approach to image licensing. The guidance was non-binding. Uptake was patchy.

What Auditors Found — and What It Costs

The Victorian Auditor-General's Office, which has jurisdiction over local government performance audits, noted in its 2024–25 performance audit of digital asset governance that duplicate licensing arrangements were among the most common sources of avoidable expenditure identified across the public sector. Individual duplicated image licences typically cost between $180 and $650 per image per year on commercial platforms, meaning even modest libraries of a few hundred images can represent tens of thousands of dollars in wasted annual spend.

Arts Victoria and Creative Victoria, which administer separate image banks for publicly funded art and cultural projects, have each implemented deduplication tools since 2024 — software that flags near-identical files before a new licence is purchased. Councils have been slower to follow. The Municipal Association of Victoria ran a pilot deduplication program across six metropolitan councils in the first half of 2025, centred on libraries stored at the MAV's Collins Street offices, but a broader rollout has not yet been announced.

Merri-bek Council's communications team told its audit and risk committee in April 2026 that an internal review had identified more than 400 duplicate image assets within its library, with an estimated remediation cost of around $12,000 — still cheaper than continuing to pay duplicate licence fees indefinitely.

For residents and ratepayers watching council budgets in suburbs from Brunswick to Preston, the practical upshot is straightforward: councils that audit and consolidate their digital image holdings now will free up funds that can be redirected to capital works or community services. The Victorian government's Digital Strategy for Local Government, updated in March 2026, lists centralised asset management as a priority action for the current term. Councils that delay face not just ongoing waste but the prospect of a performance audit finding that names them specifically — something that has proven a reliable motivator for change elsewhere in the public sector.