Wollongong Council's Duplicate Image Audit Flags Hundreds of Planning Files This Week

Wollongong City Council's planning and building services division completed the first phase of a duplicate image replacement audit this week, identifying more than 400 redundant file attachments sitting inside the council's electronic DA lodgement system. The review, conducted across the week ending July 4, targeted development applications lodged through the NSW Planning Portal for properties across the local government area, from Crown Street in the CBD to industrial precincts near Port Kembla.

The issue matters right now because the council is under pressure to accelerate housing approvals. The NSW Government's housing delivery targets — part of the broader Transport Oriented Development reforms — require local councils to demonstrate faster assessment turnaround. Duplicate image files, some uploaded multiple times by applicants or their consultants, inflate individual DA file sizes and slow assessors who must manually verify which version of a site plan or elevation drawing is current.

Where the Bottleneck Is Hitting Hardest

The duplication problem showed up most prominently in applications tied to medium-density residential projects in Fairy Meadow and Corrimal, where a wave of dual-occupancy and townhouse submissions arrived between January and May 2026. Council's development assessment team on Burelli Street has been working through a queue of more than 180 active applications as of this week, and planning officers flagged that several files contained four or five copies of identical drainage diagrams or stormwater reports — each uploaded as a separate PDF or image attachment.

The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility, which has an existing data management partnership with the council, was consulted earlier this year about improving the portal's deduplication logic. No formal contract has been announced, but council documents tabled at the June 23 ordinary meeting noted that discussions with technology partners were ongoing as part of the council's Digital Service Improvement Program adopted in late 2025.

BlueScope Steel's Port Kembla works have also generated a cluster of complex industrial DAs this year as the company advances its environmental upgrade approvals linked to the green steel transition. Those files tend to run larger than residential applications, and planning officers noted in the June 23 agenda that some industrial submissions were exceeding 2GB — well above the portal's recommended 500MB ceiling — partly because of repeated image uploads across amendment rounds.

What the Data Shows

Council's internal document audit, summarised in the July 1 weekly operations report circulated to departmental managers, counted 412 confirmed duplicate image instances across 97 separate DA files. Removing those files is expected to reduce average file sizes by roughly 30 percent in the affected applications. That figure comes from the operations report, which is not yet published on the council's public website but was described at a staff briefing on Thursday.

Processing times for medium-complexity DAs in Wollongong averaged 62 days in the March 2026 quarter, according to council's quarterly performance report released in May. The NSW Government's target under the planning acceleration framework is 40 days for that category. Officers believe file-size bloat is one contributing factor, though not the only one.

Applicants lodging new DAs through the NSW Planning Portal are being advised by council's duty planners — reachable at the Burelli Street counter or by phone — to compress images to under 5MB each and to avoid re-uploading files when submitting amendments. The council's website updated its lodgement checklist on July 2 to include explicit instructions on image file formats, recommending PDF/A or JPEG at 150dpi for plans and photos.

The second phase of the audit, covering DAs lodged before December 2024, is scheduled to begin in August. Council has not indicated whether any fee adjustments or applicant notifications will follow from files already in the system, but planning officers have indicated that affected applications will not be delayed further as a result of the cleanup process itself.