How Wollongong's planning documents ended up riddled with duplicate images — and what it cost

Wollongong City Council's development assessment unit flagged the problem formally in late 2024, but the underlying conditions that produced it had been building since at least 2021. Across hundreds of development applications lodged through the NSW Planning Portal, supporting documents — site photographs, shadow diagrams, streetscape renders — were being duplicated, mislabelled and reattached to the wrong files. By the time internal auditors traced the scope of the error, applications covering everything from dual-occupancy builds in Fairy Meadow to industrial expansion proposals near Port Kembla were affected.

The timing matters. Wollongong is processing more development applications than at any point in the past decade, driven partly by state government pressure to fast-track housing supply across the Illawarra Shoalhaven region. The NSW government's Transport Oriented Development program, which targets higher-density construction around train stations, brought a surge of submissions near Wollongong, Unanderra and Dapto stations from mid-2023 onward. That volume — arriving fast, through a relatively new digital lodgement system — is where the duplication problem took root.

How the errors compounded

The NSW Planning Portal replaced older council-by-council systems in a staggered rollout that reached most of the Illawarra in 2020 and 2021. Applicants uploading multiple documents found the portal's file-naming validation was inconsistently enforced: two documents with identical filenames but different content could both attach to a single application without triggering an alert. Architectural firms submitting large residential flat building proposals — several of which clustered around the Crown Street and Keira Street corridors in central Wollongong — often reused template image filenames across projects. The portal logged them. The council's document management system, running a separate database, sometimes imported them twice.

The practical consequence was that assessment officers reviewing an application could open a photo set and find the same streetscape image appearing in place of a required shadow diagram, or a floor plan duplicated where a services layout should have sat. In most cases the error was caught during assessment. In a smaller number, objections were lodged by neighbours who received notified copies of documents that didn't match what was on public exhibition.

The Illawarra Pilot Program for Digital DA Lodgement, a joint initiative between Wollongong City Council and the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, had been designed specifically to reduce paper errors and cut assessment timeframes. That program launched in March 2022 and was benchmarked against a target of reducing average assessment time for complying development certificates from 28 days to under 10. The duplication issue did not nullify those gains entirely, but it introduced a category of re-work — identifying, isolating and replacing mismatched images — that the program's workflow had not anticipated.

The fix, and what comes next

Council's planning and environment directorate began implementing a file-integrity checking protocol in early 2025. Under the updated workflow, every document bundle lodged through the portal is run through a checksum comparison before it enters the assessment queue. Duplicate files are flagged automatically and returned to the applicant for correction before an application is formally accepted. The directorate also worked with the University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility, based on Northfields Avenue, to test an image-recognition layer that could identify visually identical images even when they carried different filenames.

For applicants, the practical advice is straightforward: review document bundles before lodgement, ensure every image file carries a unique, descriptive filename that reflects its actual content, and use the portal's pre-lodgement check service — a free tool available through the council's Development Services team at the Burelli Street civic offices — to validate the package before it enters the formal queue. Applications returned for document correction lose their lodgement date, which matters for projects working against approval deadlines tied to construction finance.

The broader lesson from Wollongong's experience is that digitising a paper-heavy system does not automatically remove the errors that lived in that system — it often just moves them somewhere less visible. The council is expected to publish a revised applicant guide covering document standards by the end of July 2026.