Perth Councils and State Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Public Records This Week

Perth's local councils and state government agencies spent much of this week scrambling to address a growing backlog of duplicate images embedded in public-facing digital records — a problem that has quietly undermined the reliability of everything from planning portal documents to Metronet project archives. The issue came to a head after the City of Vincent and the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage both flagged data integrity concerns in separate internal reviews concluded late last month.

The timing matters. Western Australia's sustained budget surplus — built largely on iron ore royalties — has funded an accelerated push to digitise land titles, heritage assessments, and infrastructure documents. That digitisation sprint, while broadly welcome, has created a secondary problem: automated scanning pipelines that ingest PDF attachments and image files without checking whether near-identical copies already exist in the system. The result is bloated databases, slower public search tools, and, in at least some cases, conflicting versions of the same planning document appearing side by side on government portals.

Where the Problem Is Showing Up

The City of Vincent, which covers suburbs including Leederville, Mount Hawthorn, and North Perth, began a structured audit of its development application image library in late June 2026 after staff noticed repeated file uploads tied to the Beaufort Street corridor redevelopment submissions. Council's records team identified more than 400 duplicate image entries within a single project folder group — files that had been uploaded via the Pathway software system, which many Perth local governments use to manage permit and planning data.

Across town, the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, headquartered on Victoria Avenue in the CBD, is dealing with a similar issue inside its online DAP — Development Assessment Panel — document repository. Officers there began running deduplication scripts on 3 July after a contractor flagged that public submissions for two separate Stirling-area projects had been indexed with cross-linked image attachments, making it difficult to confirm which images belonged to which proposal.

The Stirling complication is particularly notable given the volume of planning activity near the Osborne Park and Herdsman Lake precincts, where rezoning proposals tied to housing density targets have generated unusually high document traffic since early 2026. Western Australia's rental vacancy rate has sat well below two per cent for several consecutive quarters, pushing the state government to fast-track medium-density approvals, which in turn has increased the load on planning databases handling image-heavy architectural drawings.

What Agencies Are Doing About It

The Landgate office at Midland, which manages the state's land title and survey records, has been running a duplicate-detection program since February 2026 using open-source image-hashing tools layered on top of its existing document management infrastructure. That program has so far flagged and resolved roughly 12,000 duplicate image files across historical cadastral survey scans, according to information published in Landgate's March 2026 quarterly operations summary.

The City of Vincent's audit, by contrast, is still in early stages. Council officers told residents via a 1 July council briefing notice that the review was expected to run through the end of July, with a remediation plan to follow. The council has also begun reviewing whether its Pathway system configuration could be adjusted to reject visually identical uploads at the point of submission rather than after the fact.

Technology procurement is the next battleground. Several Perth local governments are understood to be watching the outcome of a Department of Finance tender process — advertised on the WA Government's Tenders WA portal earlier this year — for a whole-of-government document management platform intended to replace legacy systems across multiple agencies. Duplicate image handling is listed as a functional requirement in the tender specifications.

For residents and businesses submitting planning applications or accessing public records through council and state portals right now, the practical advice is straightforward: download and save copies of submitted documents at the time of lodgement, note the reference number assigned at submission, and follow up directly with the relevant council if a document appears to be missing or doubled in a public search. The City of Perth's customer service centre on Barrack Street remains open weekdays for in-person records queries while the broader system issues are resolved.