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

Planning officers at multiple Perth local governments flagged a worsening duplicate image problem in development application portals this week, with affected councils including the City of Stirling and the Town of Victoria Park reporting that submitted site photos and architectural renders are being uploaded multiple times or mismatched to wrong lots — stalling assessments and frustrating applicants.

The timing matters because WA's housing approval pipeline is already under pressure. Perth's population growth, driven partly by AUKUS-related defence worker arrivals and a broader migration surge, has pushed monthly development application volumes to levels the state's digital infrastructure was not built to handle. When duplicate images appear in the system, planners must manually identify and delete the correct file before an application can legally proceed — a process that adds days, sometimes weeks, to each case.

What Went Wrong and Where It Showed Up

The problem surfaced most visibly through the state government's Development Assessment Panels online lodgement system, which processes major applications above certain thresholds, and through the City of Stirling's MyDevelopment portal covering suburbs from Inglewood to Scarborough. Officers who use both platforms noted this week that a software update rolled out in late June introduced a caching error that allowed image files to duplicate on upload if a submitter clicked the upload button more than once during a slow connection — a common occurrence given NBN speed inconsistencies across Perth's northern and eastern corridors.

The Town of Victoria Park, which processes a high volume of medium-density and mixed-use applications along Albany Highway and around the Burswood peninsula precinct, confirmed it had identified duplicate image entries across several active applications. Staff there have been working through the queue manually since Tuesday. The City of Fremantle, which runs its own separate portal, said it had not seen the same volume of duplicates but was monitoring submissions following the alert.

The Metronet expansion program adds another layer of urgency. Transit-oriented development applications near new station precincts — including Morley-Ellenbrook and Yanchep line sites — are among the highest-volume categories moving through state and local assessment systems right now. Any slowdown hits projects that the Cook government has publicly tied to its housing supply commitments.

What Councils and Applicants Should Do Now

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, which oversees the DAP lodgement platform, has not yet issued a formal public advisory as of Friday afternoon. However, planning consultancies operating out of the Perth CBD — including firms based in St Georges Terrace — have been circulating internal guidance to clients this week advising applicants to upload images one at a time using a wired internet connection where possible, and to clear browser cache before starting a new lodgement session.

For individual homeowners lodging their own applications, the practical advice is straightforward: if you submitted an application this week and used the multifile upload function, log back in and check the attachments tab before your application is formally received. Removing the duplicate yourself at that stage costs nothing. Waiting for a planner to catch it can add five to ten business days to the assessment clock — a significant delay when Perth's median house price is sitting well above $800,000 and holding costs on development sites are accumulating daily.

Councils have been asked to document duplicate image instances and report them to the department's digital services team by July 11, according to information circulating in local government networks this week. Whether a software patch will be ready before that deadline is unclear. The June update that introduced the caching error was itself intended to fix a different file-size validation issue, meaning any rollback carries its own risks for applications already in the system.

For Perth's planning sector, a week that should have been dominated by talk of Metronet-adjacent development and AUKUS-linked housing demand has instead been partly consumed by a mundane but genuinely disruptive file management problem — one that illustrates how fragile the digital backbone of the state's approvals system remains when volume spikes.