Perth Government Agencies Race to Purge Duplicate Images From Public Records This Week

Western Australian state agencies and at least a dozen Perth metropolitan councils received formal guidance this week on removing duplicate and incorrectly assigned images from public-facing digital records systems — a housekeeping exercise that sounds mundane until you consider the scale of the problem it is trying to fix.

The issue sits at the intersection of two pressures that have been building for several years. WA's population has grown sharply, driven by AUKUS defence workforce arrivals, resources sector fly-in fly-out workers settling permanently, and a broader immigration-driven housing surge that pushed Perth's population past 2.3 million. Every new planning application, property record, and infrastructure file created in that period adds to a document load that agencies were not always equipped to manage cleanly. Duplicate images — the same aerial photograph filed twice under different parcel IDs, or a site photo attached to the wrong development application — are a byproduct of high-volume data entry under pressure.

What Triggered the Audit Push

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, headquartered on Optima Centre Drive in Osborne Park, flagged the problem internally after a routine data-quality review in the first quarter of 2026 found a meaningful proportion of image records in the Landgate system were either duplicated or cross-referenced to incorrect property folios. Landgate's digital cadastre holds records for every titled parcel in the state, and image integrity is not a cosmetic concern — inaccurate photographs attached to property files can affect valuations, development approvals, and heritage assessments.

The City of Stirling, which processes one of the highest volumes of development applications of any local government authority in metropolitan Perth, confirmed this week it was conducting an internal review of image files across its Hesperia Place administration systems. The City of Joondalup, covering the northern corridor from Edgewater to Two Rocks, is understood to be running a parallel audit of its online property enquiry portal, though the scope of that review has not been formally announced.

The impetus is partly practical and partly regulatory. The WA Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, published by the Office of Digital Government, sets data-quality benchmarks that agencies are required to demonstrate compliance with by 31 July 2026. Duplicate image records are one of the cleaner metrics to measure and one of the more embarrassing ones to fail on.

What Councils and Agencies Are Actually Doing

For most agencies, the work involves running deduplication scripts against image libraries and then manually reviewing flagged files where automated tools cannot determine which version is authoritative. That manual step is the bottleneck. A council planning department dealing with a post-Metronet development corridor — the Yanchep Rail Extension opened its northern stations in late 2024, triggering a wave of subdivision activity in Butler and Alkimos — may have accumulated thousands of aerial and site images in a compressed period.

The practical stakes are higher than they might appear. When a duplicate image sits on the wrong property record, a planning officer pulling up a site for assessment may be looking at a photograph of a different lot entirely. In a city where infill development along the Morley-Ellenbrook Line corridor is proceeding at pace and where lot sizes are shrinking, that kind of error is not trivially corrected after a decision has been made.

Technology vendors who supply content management systems to local governments in WA have reported increased inquiry volumes this week, with at least one Perth-based software firm describing the period as unusually active for mid-winter. No contracts or procurement figures have been made public.

Agencies that cannot demonstrate satisfactory progress against their image-record integrity metrics by the July 31 deadline face the prospect of an unfavourable notation in their digital governance reporting — not a fine, but the kind of finding that resurfaces in budget estimate hearings. For departments already under scrutiny over the state's record infrastructure spend, that is motivation enough. Residents with queries about specific property records can contact Landgate directly through its Victoria Avenue, Midland office or via the online portal at landgate.wa.gov.au.