Perth Leads Australian Cities in Tackling Duplicate Image Sprawl, but Singapore Still Sets the Pace

Perth's local governments and state agencies are accelerating efforts to strip duplicate images from digital property listings, planning portals and public-record databases — a housekeeping task that has ballooned into a serious data-governance challenge as housing demand and AUKUS-related infrastructure announcements flood government systems with new visual content.

The trigger is straightforward. A surge in development applications across growth corridors in Ellenbrook, Alkimos and the Metronet transit precincts near Forrestfield has pushed the volume of uploaded site photographs, architectural renders and heritage documentation images to levels that several City of Swan and City of Wanneroo systems were not built to handle. When the same image is uploaded multiple times — under different file names, by different officers, across different platforms — search results degrade, storage costs climb and, in some cases, public records become legally ambiguous about which version of a document is authoritative.

Where Perth Sits Relative to Peer Cities

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority tackled this problem at scale in 2023, embedding automated hash-matching tools directly into its GovTech digital infrastructure, according to publicly available URA documentation. Amsterdam's municipality completed a city-wide deduplication audit of its planning image archive in early 2025, covering more than 1.2 million stored files across the Omgevingsloket online portal. Auckland Council, which merged 13 local bodies in 2010 and has been managing legacy data fragmentation ever since, is still working through a deduplication programme it flagged in its 2024–2025 annual report as incomplete.

Perth sits ahead of Auckland but behind Singapore and Amsterdam on most practical measures. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage launched an internal digital asset review in the second half of 2025, covering image records held across the state's DAP — Development Assessment Panel — submission system. That review has not yet produced a published completion date or cost estimate. The City of Perth, which manages the CBD and inner-city precincts including Northbridge and East Perth, has separately been running a records-management upgrade project under its 2024–2027 Digital Strategy, a document available on the council's website, though detailed milestones have not been made public.

Housing advocates and property lawyers in the western suburbs have been pointing to the problem in practical terms. When a planning file for a subdivision in Scarborough or a mixed-use development near the Stirling train station contains four near-identical photographs logged as separate evidentiary documents, it creates friction for anyone — a resident, a solicitor, a journalist — trying to understand the approved design via the online public register. The friction is not trivial. According to the Western Australian Auditor General's 2024 report on digital records management across state agencies, inconsistent file-naming conventions and redundant document uploads were identified as a systemic issue in multiple agencies, though the report did not attach a dollar cost to the problem.

What Comes Next for Perth's Digital Records

The state government's broader push on digital infrastructure, partly driven by the requirements of AUKUS contract administration at HMAS Stirling on Garden Island, has created some political momentum for fixing underlying data-quality problems. Defence procurement processes require strict document versioning, and the disciplines required for that work are filtering into adjacent state agency workflows, according to publicly available WA Government ICT Strategy documents updated in late 2025.

For ratepayers and anyone lodging a development application, the most practical advice is to check submission portals carefully. The City of Perth's eplanning system and the state's JDAP online portal both allow applicants to review previously uploaded files before adding new ones — a simple step that, if followed consistently, would reduce duplication at the source rather than requiring expensive retrospective audits. Several Perth planning consultants, in public commentary on industry forums, have noted that many duplicate uploads happen simply because applicants are uncertain whether a prior submission went through.

Singapore's model — automated rejection of exact-match duplicate files at the point of upload — remains the cleanest solution. Whether Perth adopts something similar will likely depend on decisions made in the state's 2026–2027 budget cycle, where digital infrastructure spending is competing with Metronet stage completions and the ongoing cost pressures of a housing construction market that has not meaningfully cooled since 2022.