Perth Councils and State Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Swamping Planning Portals This Week

Perth's planning and property sector has hit a frustrating bureaucratic wall this week, as duplicate image files — redundant photographs, scanned plans and site maps uploaded multiple times by applicants — have compounded processing backlogs at development assessment panels and local government portals across the metropolitan area. The problem, which has been building for months, escalated noticeably after the City of Stirling and the City of Swan both flagged data management issues in their online lodgement systems during the last week of June 2026.

The timing is particularly damaging. Western Australia is in the middle of the steepest residential construction demand in a generation, driven by immigration-fuelled population growth, Metronet-linked corridor development and an influx of defence workers tied to AUKUS contracts at HMAS Stirling on Garden Island. Every week a housing application stalls in a clogged digital queue is a week a family waits for a home.

Where the Bottleneck Is Biting

The City of Stirling's planning portal, which processes applications for suburbs stretching from Scarborough to Balga, has been among the most affected. Council staff there have reportedly been manually identifying and removing duplicate site photographs from application bundles — a step that should be automated. The City of Swan, which covers fast-growing outer corridors including Ellenbrook and Bullsbrook, faces a similar burden as its Development Applications Online system handles record submission volumes linked to new estate releases north of the Reid Highway.

The state government's own Development Assessment Panels secretariat, based on St Georges Terrace in the CBD, coordinates decisions on higher-value projects — those above the $10 million threshold for most regional panels. Staff there have noted that duplicate imagery in larger commercial and mixed-use applications can add days to the review cycle when assessors must reconcile conflicting or repeated plan sets before they can formally accept a lodgement.

Western Australia's construction sector logged more than 26,000 residential building approvals in the 12 months to March 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics — a figure that has placed sustained pressure on every digital touchpoint in the approvals chain. Industry groups representing builders in the western suburbs and the Joondalup corridor have pointed to administrative delays, including data management failures, as a genuine constraint on housing supply.

What Councils and Applicants Are Being Told to Do Now

The practical response this week has centred on applicants being asked to audit their own submissions before lodging. The City of Stirling updated its lodgement checklist guidance on July 2, asking applicants to confirm that each document type — site plan, elevation drawing, photograph set — appears only once per application bundle and is named with a unique file identifier rather than a generic label like "photo1.jpg." The City of Swan has issued similar informal guidance through its planning counter at its administration centre on Midland Gate.

For larger projects processed through the DAP secretariat, the shift matters most in the pre-lodgement phase. Consultants and architects preparing applications for sites along the Metronet Morley-Ellenbrook Line corridor — where land assembly and rezoning activity is accelerating ahead of the line's scheduled completion — have been advised by planning agents to run image deduplication checks using standard file management software before formal submission.

The broader fix will depend on whether local governments invest in automated deduplication tools baked into their portal infrastructure. Several east-coast councils, including some in greater Sydney and Melbourne, integrated such tools into their planning software after similar problems in 2024. Whether Perth's councils follow that path will likely come down to the 2026-27 budget cycle, with the WA state government's recent surplus position giving the Local Government Minister some scope to offer digital infrastructure grants. Applicants dealing with projects in affected areas should contact their relevant council planning department directly before lodging anything this month to confirm the current preferred submission format.