Digital Confusion: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying About Wollongong's Duplicate Image Problem

Wollongong City Council's online development application portal logged more than 340 duplicate image files across active planning submissions in the first half of 2026, according to internal records reviewed by The Daily Wollongong. The redundant files — identical photographs and site plans uploaded multiple times by applicants and assessors alike — are slowing approval workflows at a moment when the Illawarra region can least afford delays. Housing supply is already stretched, BlueScope Steel's Port Kembla green transition has generated a wave of new industrial permit applications, and the state government is watching every council's approval turnaround times.

The timing matters. NSW Premier Chris Minns addressed his party's state conference in Sydney on Saturday, acknowledging the political pressure his government faces heading into the next electoral cycle. Planning efficiency — including at the local government level — has become a touchstone issue across the Illawarra Shoalhaven region, where the state-backed Regional Development Fund has directed funds toward infrastructure meant to support, among other things, digital upgrades at council level. The duplicate image issue, unglamorous as it sounds, sits squarely inside that reform agenda.

What the Experts Are Saying

Digital records specialists at the University of Wollongong's Faculty of Business and Law have been examining the problem as part of a broader 2026 research project into local government information management across regional NSW. The project, which began in February and is due to deliver preliminary findings by September, focuses on how councils manage unstructured data — images, PDFs and scanned documents — within legacy content management systems. Researchers working on the project have described duplicate image accumulation as a predictable consequence of systems that lack automated deduplication functions, particularly when multiple staff members or external consultants have upload access to the same application folder.

The Illawarra Business Chamber, which operates out of Crown Street in the Wollongong CBD, has raised the efficiency question with council officers in recent months. The chamber's concern is practical: duplicate files extend the time an assessor spends reviewing a single DA, and in a market where residential construction approvals in the Wollongong local government area have been running behind projected demand, every added day in the queue has a dollar cost. Industry figures the chamber has cited in previous submissions to council put the average cost of a one-week DA delay for a medium-density residential project at between $4,000 and $7,000 in holding and financing costs, depending on site size and finance structure.

Council's Response and the Path Forward

Wollongong City Council's Director of Planning has confirmed the portal issue is being assessed, though no formal remediation timeline has been announced publicly. Council officers have indicated they are examining two options: a short-term manual audit of active files lodged since January 2025, and a longer-term procurement process for a new document management platform that would include automated hash-checking to flag identical image files before they enter the system. A procurement process of that scale would likely take until mid-2027 to complete under standard NSW government tendering rules.

Port Kembla-based engineering consultancies, several of which lodge multiple large industrial DAs each month on behalf of BlueScope and renewable energy proponents at the Port Kembla Energy Terminal precinct, have separately told council's pre-lodgement advisory service they are willing to adopt standardised file-naming conventions if council publishes a formal style guide. That guide does not yet exist, though council's digital services team has reportedly been drafting one since March.

The University of Wollongong's smart cities research group, based at the Innovation Campus on Squires Way in North Wollongong, is also understood to be in early-stage conversations with council about whether artificial intelligence-assisted document triage tools trialled in European municipal contexts could be adapted for Australian local government use. Nothing has been formalised. In the meantime, planning applicants lodging through the NSW Planning Portal are being advised by council staff to check their uploads manually before submitting — a stopgap that places the compliance burden back on the applicant rather than the system itself.