Perth Councils and Agencies Scramble to Fix Duplicate Image Problem on Public Records This Week

Western Australian local governments and state agencies spent the first week of July wrestling with a growing backlog of duplicate image entries embedded across public-facing planning portals and digital archives — a problem that has quietly compounded since the Metronet rail expansion accelerated document-heavy infrastructure approvals across the metropolitan corridor.

The issue came into sharper focus this week after the City of Stirling and the City of Vincent both flagged internal reviews of their development application registers, where batch-scanned documents uploaded since January 2025 were found to contain repeated image files attached to multiple, distinct property records. In both cases, the duplicate entries created ambiguity about which imagery was legally current for assessment purposes.

The timing matters. WA's planning system is under sustained pressure from immigration-driven housing demand and a state government committed to rezoning and densification targets under the Perth and Peel@3.5 million framework. When image records are duplicated or mislabelled in a development register, assessment officers cannot always confirm which photograph or site plan corresponds to a current application — a delay that flows downstream into approvals, appeals, and in some cases, construction finance decisions.

What Happened This Week

Staff at the City of Stirling's offices on Dundas Road, Floreat, began a line-by-line audit of upload logs dating to the rollout of their new document management platform in late 2024. The City of Vincent, whose development team operates from Loftus Street in Leederville, confirmed it was running a parallel check after an internal flag was raised during a routine quality-assurance cycle in late June 2026.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage — which manages the statewide Development Assessment Panels system — said in a public update on its website this week that it was aware of image duplication errors reported by several local governments and was reviewing whether the problem extended to DAP submissions lodged through the state's online portal. No specific number of affected records was published in that update.

The State Records Office of Western Australia, based in Alexander Drive, Midland, has guidance frameworks covering digital record integrity, but those standards were written primarily for textual records. Image-specific metadata validation — including hash-checking to catch exact-duplicate files — is not yet a mandated requirement under WA's current State Records Act 2000 compliance schedules, which creates a gap that practitioners say has widened as bulk scanning volumes have grown.

Why Duplicates Are Harder to Catch Than They Sound

A duplicate image in a planning database is not always a copy of the same JPEG appearing twice in the same folder. Often it is the same underlying photograph assigned two different document reference numbers, or the same site plan re-uploaded under a revised application number without the original being archived or flagged as superseded. Officers reviewing an application may work from the wrong version without realising it.

The Land Information Authority — Landgate — which maintains the state's authoritative spatial datasets from its Midland campus, has its own image validation protocols for cadastral and aerial photography. But Landgate's systems are separate from local government document management platforms, meaning a duplication error on a council's internal portal does not automatically trigger a flag at the state level.

Perth's construction sector has had a busy first half of 2026, with median lot prices in the outer northern corridor around Alkimos and Eglinton running well above $300,000 and turnover in development applications at levels that have stretched council assessment teams. That volume is part of what created the conditions for batch-upload errors in the first place.

For applicants with live development applications at either the City of Stirling or the City of Vincent, the practical advice this week is straightforward: contact the relevant assessment officer directly, confirm which image or plan set is recorded as the active version on your application, and request written confirmation of the document reference number and upload date. Both councils have acknowledged the review is underway. Anyone who lodged a DAP application through the state portal since January 2025 and who has received no correspondence in more than eight weeks should follow up with the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage to confirm their file is complete and unaffected.