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

Planning applicants across metropolitan Perth have spent the past week resubmitting documentation after a technical fault caused duplicate and incorrectly assigned images to appear across multiple online permit files on the state government's eDevelopment platform. The problem, which surfaced around 30 June, affected applications lodged through both the City of Stirling and the City of Swan portals, two of the busiest development pipelines in WA's current housing construction surge.

The timing is particularly awkward. Western Australia is in the grip of a housing demand spike driven by population growth tied to AUKUS defence project relocations to the north of the city and a sustained run of resources-sector recruitment. The state's own budget documents from May 2026 flagged a housing undersupply, and any slowdown in planning approvals hits an already strained pipeline. When submitted site plans and architectural drawings get attached to the wrong file — or appear twice on the same file, blocking the upload of fresh documents — the downstream effect can push a straightforward approval out by weeks.

What Actually Went Wrong

The fault appears to centre on the image-processing layer of the eDevelopment portal, which is administered by the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage from its offices on Optus Stadium Precinct in Burswood. When applicants uploaded new JPEG or PDF plan images between approximately 28 June and 2 July, the system in some cases cached a previously submitted image and displayed it alongside — or instead of — the newly uploaded file. Builders working out of the Osborne Park trade corridor reported discovering the problem when their certifiers flagged discrepancies during pre-assessment checks.

Industry observers have pointed out that the portal was updated in late May 2026 to accommodate a higher file-size ceiling — raised from 10 MB to 25 MB per document — as part of an effort to handle the larger BIM-format files increasingly used for AUKUS-adjacent infrastructure proposals near HMAS Stirling on Garden Island. That backend change is understood to be the starting point investigators are examining, though no official cause has been confirmed publicly.

The City of Stirling, which processes roughly 4,500 development applications per year according to its 2024–25 annual report, sent a service notice to registered applicants on 1 July advising them to hold off submitting new image files until further guidance was issued. The City of Swan followed with its own notice on 2 July. Both councils directed applicants to the Midland-based Swan district planning office and to Stirling's Civic Centre on Impressa Place in Innaloo for in-person lodgement as a workaround.

Costs and Knock-On Effects

For individual applicants, the administrative burden is real. A standard single-house development application in Perth currently attracts a base lodgement fee of $147 plus a variable levy tied to construction value. Resubmission itself carries no additional fee, but the delay can trigger extension costs if builder contracts have fixed commencement dates. Several Osborne Park-based drafting firms told colleagues via the Housing Industry Association's WA chapter email list that they were manually emailing corrected image sets directly to council planners rather than using the portal — a process that adds at least two to three business days per job.

The HIA's WA office on Stirling Highway in Nedlands has flagged the issue with the department but has not yet issued a formal public statement. The problem is not unique to Perth: similar image-duplication faults were reported on Queensland's MyDAS2 portal in 2023, where a patch took eleven days to fully resolve.

Applicants with files currently sitting in the assessment queue are advised to log into eDevelopment, navigate to their application's document library tab, and check whether the thumbnail preview matches the intended file. If a mismatch appears, the department's Burswood helpdesk — reachable on the general 1800 number listed on the DPLH website — is triaging cases in order of lodgement date. Builders with applications already past the 28-day statutory clock should request a formal clock-stop in writing to preserve their position. The department has indicated a patch is being tested and a resolution is expected before the end of next week.