How Melbourne's Public Infrastructure Ended Up Plastered With the Wrong Images — and Why It Took Years to Fix

Duplicate and misplaced images have appeared on public-facing digital displays across Melbourne for years — on screens at Flinders Street Station, on community noticeboards in Fitzroy and Brunswick, and on council-managed kiosks from the Hoddle Grid to the outer suburbs. The problem is not new. What is new is that the City of Melbourne and several inner-north councils are now actively replacing those images under a coordinated digital content audit that began in earnest in mid-2025.

The timing matters. Victoria's state government has pushed hard on digital infrastructure upgrades tied to its broader Smart City agenda, and councils facing rate-cap pressure have been forced to audit what they actually own and display rather than simply layering new content over old. The result has exposed just how badly mismanaged visual content libraries became during the rapid digitisation push between roughly 2016 and 2020, when dozens of councils and state agencies rushed to replace static signage with screen-based systems without building coherent content governance around them.

A Procurement Problem That Compounded Over Time

The core issue traces back to how those early screen networks were purchased and staffed. When Melbourne City Council rolled out its network of street-level digital totems along Swanston Street and Bourke Street Mall from around 2017, content management was often contracted out to third-party vendors who retained their own image libraries. When contracts changed hands or lapsed, the images frequently stayed — licensed for one vendor, displayed by another, or simply duplicated across dozens of screens because no single person held responsibility for the whole asset register.

Yarra City Council, which manages the heavily trafficked corridors through Collingwood and Richmond, ran into a similar structural problem. Its community digital boards — installed as part of neighbourhood improvement programs under the Yarra Community Wellbeing Strategy — pulled imagery from multiple uncoordinated sources. By 2023, several boards were displaying the same stock photograph of a heritage bluestone laneway regardless of the neighbourhood context, a visible symptom of a back-end content library that had never been properly catalogued.

The CFMEU's Victorian branch offices in the inner north, along with several community legal centres on Sydney Road, Brunswick, reported in late 2024 that digital noticeboards supplied through a shared government tender were similarly affected — showing outdated or duplicated imagery unrelated to local programs. Those reports fed into a broader review by the Department of Government Services, which by early 2025 had identified at least 340 individual display units across metropolitan Melbourne carrying duplicate or misattributed image files.

What the Audit Found — and What Comes Next

The Department of Government Services review, completed in March 2025, recommended a phased image replacement program running through to the end of the 2026 financial year, with priority given to high-traffic transit precincts including Southern Cross Station and the St Kilda Road tram corridor. The estimated cost of the content remediation work — distinct from any hardware replacement — was not publicly disclosed in the version of the report released under FOI, but the department confirmed the work was being funded from within existing digital infrastructure maintenance budgets.

For councils, the practical fix has involved appointing dedicated digital content officers, a role that barely existed in local government five years ago. Moreland — now the City of Merri-bek — advertised such a position in February 2026 at a salary range of $85,000 to $95,000, specifically citing the image audit backlog as part of the brief. At least four other inner-Melbourne councils have followed suit.

The deeper lesson from all of this is straightforward: screens are cheap and getting cheaper, but the content governance infrastructure needed to run them well is neither cheap nor automatic. Melbourne's councils learned that the hard way. The replacement program will clear the backlog by the end of 2026 if it stays on schedule — but without ongoing content audits built into vendor contracts from the outset, the same problem is likely to resurface whenever the next generation of display technology arrives.