Perth Councils and Developers Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Swamping DA Portals This Week

City of Perth planning officers flagged an escalating problem on Wednesday: duplicate and mismatched images uploaded to the state's Development Assessment Portal are delaying approvals at a rate not seen since the platform's 2021 overhaul. The backlog is sitting at more than 340 affected applications statewide, according to figures circulating within the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage as of this week — though the agency has not yet issued a formal public statement on the total count.

The timing is particularly awkward. Western Australia is processing a record volume of development applications driven by the Metronet corridor rezoning program and a surge in defence-related construction tied to AUKUS contracts near HMAS Stirling at Garden Island. Any slowdown in the approvals pipeline feeds directly into housing delivery timelines, which the Cook government has staked considerable political capital on improving after the 2025 state budget committed additional resources to planning system reform.

What Is Actually Going Wrong

The core issue is a combination of applicant error and a known software behaviour in the state's ePlanning portal. When consultants upload revised architectural drawings — particularly renders and elevation images in formats larger than 25MB — the system sometimes registers the new file without removing the previously uploaded version. Assessors then face two, sometimes three, versions of the same image tagged to the same document reference, with no automatic flag to indicate which is current.

The City of Stirling, which processes one of the highest DA volumes of any local government in the metropolitan area, confirmed to planning industry contacts this week that its inbox includes applications caught by the duplication glitch. Subiaco-based planning consultancy firms working the Karrinyup Road and Scarborough Beach Road corridors — both active Metronet-adjacent precincts — have been telling clients to expect an additional five to ten business days on top of standard statutory timeframes until the issue is resolved. Those timelines matter: the standard 10-day completeness check period is already tight when construction finance is running.

The City of Perth's Development Services team sent a notice to registered applicants on Thursday asking lodgers to manually verify their image attachments before resubmission and to use a specific filename convention introduced in June 2025. The notice did not guarantee expedited review for already-lodged files affected by the duplication.

Industry Response and What Comes Next

The Planning Institute of Australia's WA Chapter has raised the duplicate image problem in submissions before, most recently in its March 2026 feedback to the department's digital services review. The underlying ePlanning platform, built on the Objective ECM framework, has undergone several patch cycles since it replaced paper lodgement for complex applications, but file-management edge cases have persisted.

For applicants lodging through the portal right now, the practical advice from planning officers is straightforward: rename every image file with a unique identifier including a date stamp before upload, keep individual image files below 20MB, and submit a cover sheet listing every attachment by name and file size. Resubmissions that follow that protocol are being prioritised for manual review by staff at the Optima Centre on Havelock Street in Rivervale, where DPLH's digital lodgement team is based.

Developers with applications caught mid-process are being advised to contact their local government's duty planner directly rather than waiting for the portal's automated status update, which is not reliably reflecting the duplicate flag. Several project managers working on medium-density infill along the Thornlie-Cockburn Link corridor told industry peers at a Property Council networking event in West Perth on Tuesday that they had already lost a billing cycle because of the delay.

The department is expected to release a fix in the next scheduled platform update, which internal communications suggest is targeted for the week of July 14. Whether that date holds will depend on the vendor's testing cycle. Until then, every new lodgement carries the risk of landing in the same queue.