Wollongong Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Swirling Through Digital Property Records This Week

Wollongong City Council's digital services team confirmed this week it had identified more than 340 duplicate images embedded across active development application files on its ePlanning portal, a problem that has been quietly inflating file sizes, slowing assessment times and, in at least a dozen cases, causing submitted documents to be cross-matched with the wrong property address. The issue surfaced during a routine audit that began on June 23 and concluded on Thursday.

The timing matters. Council is under mounting pressure from both the Minns government's housing supply targets and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund — which has $60 million committed to streamlining approvals across the region — to get development decisions turned around faster. Duplicate and misfiled imagery is precisely the kind of administrative drag that auditors flagged in a 2025 NSW Audit Office review of local government ePlanning compliance, which found that data integrity failures added an average of 11 working days to medium-complexity DA processing times statewide.

What the Audit Found in Wollongong's System

The council's internal review, circulated to councillors ahead of Monday's ordinary meeting, found the duplicates were concentrated in DAs lodged between January 2024 and March 2026. Crown Street properties in the CBD, along with residential blocks in Fairy Meadow and Mount Ousley, accounted for roughly 60 per cent of the affected files. Many of the repeated images were site photos — shots of front elevations, boundary fences and existing structures — that applicants or their consultants had uploaded multiple times without the portal flagging the redundancy.

The portal in question is the state-run NSW Planning Portal, administered locally through council's Development & Building unit headquartered on Burelli Street. Council does not control the portal's back-end deduplication logic, which is managed by the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure. A council spokesperson confirmed the unit had formally notified the department on June 26 and was awaiting a technical response. The department had not publicly commented by the time this article was filed Saturday morning.

Wollongong City Council processed 1,847 DAs in the 2024–25 financial year, according to figures tabled at the March 2026 council meeting. Even a modest processing delay across a fraction of those files translates to real cost: the council's own fee schedule lists medium residential DA processing at $1,820 per application, and delays that push assessments past the 40-day statutory benchmark can trigger deemed refusal provisions under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, opening the door to costly Land and Environment Court appeals.

Local Applicants Caught in the Backlog

Several local builders and architectural firms operating in the Illawarra say the duplicate-image problem is symptomatic of broader portal frustrations. A small design practice operating out of Crown Street lodged applications for three separate infill housing projects in Corrimal during May and reported that two were bounced back for resubmission citing image file errors — a process that added three weeks to each. The University of Wollongong's Property and Development arm, which has several student accommodation DAs in various stages of assessment near the Northfields Avenue campus, has also flagged file-matching concerns to council staff, according to documents obtained under a Government Information (Public Access) request.

Council's digital services team says it has begun manually reviewing and replacing the flagged duplicate images, working through approximately 40 files per day. At that rate, the backlog should be cleared by late July, though that timetable depends on applicants resubmitting clean file sets promptly when contacted. Anyone who lodged a DA between January 2024 and March 2026 and has not received a site inspection booking should check their NSW Planning Portal inbox and contact council's Development & Building unit directly on 4227 7111. Council is not automatically extending statutory timeframes in affected cases, meaning applicants need to act quickly if their 40-day clock is already running.