From Aitkenvale to Belgian Gardens, community members say mismatched and duplicated photos on government and council records are causing real-world headaches they can't easily fix.
Dozens of Townsville residents have spent months trying to correct official records that carry someone else's face — a bureaucratic tangle that community advocates say is quietly worsening as digital record systems consolidate across Queensland government agencies.
The problem centres on what database administrators call duplicate image replacement: the process, or frequent lack of it, by which outdated, incorrect, or duplicated photographs attached to identity and service records get removed and replaced with accurate ones. When the system fails, a wrong image can follow a resident across licensing, healthcare, and welfare records simultaneously.
The issue carries particular weight in Townsville right now. The city's population has grown steadily, driven in part by expansion at Lavarack Barracks and RAAF Base Townsville, bringing thousands of Defence personnel and their families into local service systems within compressed timeframes. Community workers say the churn of new enrolments strains identity management processes that were not built for volume.
Pacific Islander families concentrated in the suburb of Cranbrook and First Nations community members accessing services through organisations along Flinders Street have described frustrating encounters at Queensland Health intake desks and Queensland Transport licensing offices on Sturt Street, where staff flag their records as containing an image that does not match the person standing in front of them.
The Townsville Community Law centre, based on Ogden Street in the CBD, has been fielding calls on the issue. Workers there describe a pattern: a person applies for or renews a government-issued document, an automated system links their details to an existing record carrying a different person's photograph, and the individual is then asked to prove their identity from scratch — sometimes requiring documents they no longer hold, such as an overseas birth certificate.
Defence families face a version of this on arrival. Relocations from interstate bases mean records held in one jurisdiction get merged with Queensland systems, and photographs taken years earlier at a different base get attached to a new local profile. A soldier posted to Lavarack Barracks from Darwin might find their Medicare-linked image is a photo taken at a Darwin GP clinic in 2019 — an image that no longer resembles them and that they did not know was part of their record.
The Queensland Audit Office, in its 2024–25 report on digital service delivery, noted that identity record duplication remained a systemic concern across multiple state agencies, though the report did not quantify the number of affected individuals on a regional basis. Nationally, the Australian Digital Health Agency has previously identified duplicate patient records as affecting roughly three percent of My Health Record entries, a figure that, applied to Townsville's population of approximately 200,000, would suggest several thousand local records carry some form of image or identity mismatch.
Community legal workers say the first step is straightforward but not obvious: request a copy of your own record. Under Queensland's Right to Information Act 2009, individuals can lodge an access application with the relevant state agency — typically Queensland Health or the Department of Transport and Main Roads — to see exactly what image is attached to their file. There is no fee for personal information requests under the Information Privacy Act 2009.
Once an error is identified, a formal correction request can be lodged with the same agency. The Townsville Community Law centre is currently running a drop-in clinic on the second Tuesday of each month at its Ogden Street office, specifically to help people navigate these requests without a lawyer.
For Defence families, the garrison support office at Lavarack Barracks can act as an intermediary with Queensland agencies — a pathway that community workers say fewer new arrivals know about than should.
The deeper fix, advocates argue, is a standardised state-wide protocol for image replacement that does not rely on individuals catching errors themselves. Until that exists, the burden stays exactly where it should not: on the people whose faces are wrong in the system.
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Published by The Daily Townsville
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