Perth Takes a Methodical Approach to Duplicate Image Replacement — but Is It Keeping Pace With Toronto and Amsterdam?

Perth's rapid urban expansion — driven by Metronet rail corridor development, AUKUS-linked construction around HMAS Stirling in Rockingham, and a housing demand surge that pushed median dwelling approvals to multi-year highs in 2024-25 — has created a less-discussed administrative headache: thousands of duplicate and outdated images sitting inside planning, heritage, and infrastructure databases across the city's 30 local governments.

The problem matters now because the WA state government's digital transformation agenda, running through the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, has accelerated the migration of legacy council records into centralised online systems. When a demolished building in Midland or a rezoned lot in Alkimos appears twice — once as it was, once as it is — the duplication can delay approvals, distort heritage assessments, and generate legal liability. Duplicate image records in planning systems are not a minor inconvenience; they are a data integrity failure with real planning consequences.

What Perth Is Actually Doing

The City of Perth and the City of Stirling, two of the largest local governments by database volume in the metropolitan area, have both been involved in the state-wide Digital Local Government program administered by the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. That program, which received funding commitments in the 2024-25 state budget, includes provisions for records deduplication and asset management standardisation. Specific funding figures for the image deduplication component have not been publicly itemised in budget papers released to date.

The Western Australian Land Information Authority — known as Landgate, based in Midland — maintains the state's authoritative spatial data infrastructure. Landgate's systems underpin the cadastral and imagery records that flow into local planning portals. A Landgate spokesperson had not responded to questions from The Daily Perth by deadline, but the authority's publicly available data framework documents, last updated in late 2024, describe an active programme of detecting and suppressing redundant aerial and ground-level imagery across the state's Shared Location Information Platform.

On the ground, planners working along the Metronet Yanchep Rail Extension corridor — a 72-kilometre line running north from Butler — have been dealing with overlapping image datasets that pre-date and post-date land clearing for the project. The City of Wanneroo, which covers much of that corridor, has been processing development applications at elevated volume since construction began. Duplicate imagery of cleared versus uncleared parcels in areas like Alkimos and Eglinton has, according to planning industry observers, complicated assessments of environmental buffer conditions.

How That Compares to Toronto, Amsterdam, and Singapore

Toronto's city government adopted a centralised Digital Asset Management policy under its Information and Technology division in 2022, requiring all planning imagery to pass through a mandatory deduplication hash-check before ingestion into the Planning and Growth Management portal. The policy was publicly documented in a 2023 City of Toronto audit report, which found the hash-check process reduced redundant image entries by 34 percent in its first year of operation. Amsterdam's Gemeente Amsterdam runs a comparable system through its Basis Registraties Adressen en Gebouwen — the foundational address and buildings register — where image deduplication is enforced at the point of upload by third-party surveyors and contractors.

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority, operating within a city-state context that gives it more centralised control than any Australian state, mandates a single authoritative image per development parcel and removes superseded records on a 90-day cycle. Perth has no comparable mandated cycle. The Western Australian planning system distributes image management responsibility across individual councils, meaning consistency depends heavily on each council's own IT capacity — which varies considerably between, say, the well-resourced City of Stirling on Scarborough Beach Road and a smaller outer council like the Shire of Serpentine-Jarrahdale.

The practical consequence for developers and residents is straightforward. Anyone lodging a development application through the state's DIDO (Development in a Day Online) platform or the broader ePlanning portal should confirm that the imagery attached to their lot record matches current site conditions before submission. Discrepancies between a duplicate legacy image and current site photographs have contributed to requests for further information that extend application processing times. The Department of Planning has not publicly quantified how frequently this occurs, but the issue is well-known among planning consultants operating across the northern suburbs.

The state's next digital infrastructure review is expected to be tabled before the WA Parliament by mid-2027. Until a mandatory deduplication standard is embedded in that framework, Perth will continue managing this problem council by council — a slower and less reliable method than its peer cities have already moved past.