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

Property owners and developers lodging planning applications through the City of Perth and surrounding local governments have hit a recurring wall this week: duplicate images attached to digital submissions are triggering automatic rejection flags, stalling approvals at a moment when the housing pipeline cannot afford delays. The problem has been particularly acute along the Metronet corridor, where new dwelling approvals in suburbs like Morley, Ellenbrook and Midland are already under pressure from immigration-driven demand.

The issue centres on the way PDF and image files are packaged inside the state's electronic lodgement platforms. When applicants — or their drafting software — embed the same site plan, elevation drawing or photo twice inside a single submission package, the backend validation system flags the entire application as non-compliant. That kicks off a manual review process that can add weeks to an already stretched assessment queue.

Why This Week's Surge Matters

The timing is not random. The WA Labor government's mid-year budget update, released in late June 2026, reaffirmed housing construction as a centrepiece of economic strategy, with the Metronet program alone expected to open up land for thousands of new dwellings between now and 2030. At the same time, the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has been pushing applicants toward fully paperless lodgement through its DAP (Development Assessment Panel) and eDevelopment portals. The volume of digitised submissions has climbed sharply, and so has the rate of formatting errors.

The City of Stirling — Perth's most populous local government area, covering suburbs from Scarborough to Balcatta — confirmed this week that its planning team had issued revised lodgement guidance to address the duplicate-image problem. The City of Wanneroo, processing large volumes of greenfield applications in the northern suburbs, has similarly updated its checklist for applicants using third-party drafting packages such as AutoCAD and Archicad, which can silently duplicate image layers when exporting to PDF.

The practical consequence for applicants is a resubmission cycle. Each bounce back adds a minimum of five business days to the clock under standard processing rules. For a house-and-land package in Alkimos or a multi-unit development on Scarborough Beach Road, that delay can breach sunset clauses in finance agreements or push projects past the end of the July-to-September building season.

What the Fix Actually Involves

The solution is procedurally straightforward but requires discipline. Applicants need to flatten PDF files before upload, removing duplicate image objects using software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro or free tools like PDF24. The City of Perth's planning portal, accessible through the local government's website on Hay Street, now includes a revised FAQ page — updated as of this week — that walks through the flattening process step by step.

The Western Australian Planning Commission has also flagged the issue in its July 2026 applicant bulletin, recommending that architectural firms and drafting contractors audit their export settings before the end of the month, when a fresh round of Metronet-corridor rezoning applications is expected to land. The bulletin does not carry the force of regulation, but planning practitioners say it signals that the commission is aware the error rate is running higher than usual.

For individual homeowners doing their own applications — a common scenario for single dwelling extensions in suburbs like Mount Lawley or Fremantle — the advice is simpler: use the preview function in the lodgement portal before hitting submit, and check that no image appears twice in the document tree on the left-hand panel of any PDF viewer.

Local building certifiers and planning consultants operating out of the West Perth professional precinct say they expect the backlog to clear within three to four weeks once applicants absorb the updated guidance. The bigger test will come in August, when the spring building season typically drives a second surge in lodgements. Agencies that have not streamlined their internal file-checking workflows by then are likely to face the same problem again.