Wollongong Council Scrambles to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing City's Digital Planning Portal

Wollongong City Council confirmed this week that a persistent duplicate image fault inside its Development Application (DA) online portal has stalled the processing of at least 47 active applications since late June, with some submissions showing the same photograph uploaded dozens of times and crowding out supporting documents. The council's Information Technology and Digital Services team identified the root cause on Thursday and is now working through a manual correction process expected to take until at least July 11.

The timing is rough. The Illawarra region is running hot on development activity — housing supply is the single biggest pressure point for the council heading into the second half of 2026, and any friction in the DA pipeline compounds backlogs that planners were already fighting to reduce. The state government's Housing Delivery Authority, established earlier this year under the Minns government's planning reform agenda, has been pushing councils to cut approval times below 40 days for standard residential builds. Wollongong's current median sits at 54 days, according to the council's own quarterly planning performance figures released in May.

The affected applications include residential builds in Fairy Meadow and Figtree, a commercial fitout on Crown Street in the city centre, and several submissions linked to the Port Kembla Precinct renewal zone, where BlueScope Steel's green transition partners have been lodging heritage impact statements and industrial modification documents. The Port Kembla work is particularly time-sensitive: some documents attached to the renewable energy infrastructure corridor have compliance windows tied to NSW Department of Planning sign-off schedules.

How the Fault Crept In

Council officers say the problem stems from a software update pushed to the ePlanning NSW system — the state-run platform that feeds into local government portals — on June 28. That update changed how image metadata is read during file upload, causing the system to treat each re-load of a page as a fresh image submission. By the time applicants or their architects noticed the duplication, some DA folders contained upwards of 80 copies of a single site photograph, pushing total file sizes past the 200MB cap and triggering automatic rejection flags on the backend.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences has had a support arrangement with the council's digital infrastructure team for the past three years under a knowledge-transfer agreement. A faculty spokesperson confirmed on Friday that the university had not been formally asked to assist with this particular incident, though the council's IT team has drawn on shared resources in the past during critical system outages.

For applicants using private planning consultants — a common practice for larger projects in the Gong — the duplication fault has meant re-uploading complete document sets through the state ePlanning portal rather than the council's own gateway, adding administrative time and cost. Industry body the Planning Institute of Australia's NSW Chapter said it was aware of the problem and had logged a formal query with the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.

What Applicants Should Do Now

Council's planning counter at the Burelli Street civic offices has been fielding walk-in enquiries since Tuesday. Staff are advising applicants with applications lodged between June 28 and July 3 to check their submission portal accounts and, if duplicate images are visible, to contact the DA tracking inbox directly rather than re-submitting the entire application — a move that would create a fresh lodgement date and restart the compliance clock.

The council has committed to back-dating the acknowledgement date for any application demonstrably affected by the fault, so applicants do not lose their place in the queue. That commitment is not yet codified in writing and advocates from the Illawarra Business Chamber are pushing for formal confirmation before the end of next week.

The Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure told council officers a full patch to the ePlanning NSW platform would be deployed no later than July 14. Until then, applicants lodging new DAs are being advised to compress images below 2MB each and avoid using the portal's drag-and-drop interface, instead using the manual file browser option as a workaround.