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

Wollongong City Council acknowledged this week that its public-facing development application portal contains hundreds of duplicate and incorrectly labelled property images, a technical fault that has caused confusion for residents lodging planning applications across suburbs including Fairy Meadow, Figtree and the Wollongong CBD. Council staff confirmed the issue at a regular administrative review meeting held at the Crown Street civic building on Tuesday, July 1, describing it as a data migration problem that dates to a software upgrade completed in late 2025.

The timing matters. The Illawarra region is in the middle of a housing supply push, with the NSW Government's Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund actively directing investment toward faster approvals and more residential infill. Any system fault that slows or muddles the DA process — even one that appears cosmetic — has real consequences for applicants who may be relying on correct photographic evidence to support boundary, heritage or character assessments.

What the Problem Actually Looks Like

The duplicate image fault means that when applicants or neighbours look up a specific DA on the council's online portal, they sometimes see photographs attached to the wrong property address, or find the same image appearing multiple times under a single application number. For properties in heritage-listed precincts — including parts of the Wollongong conservation zone around Kembla Street and sections of the historic North Wollongong foreshore — an incorrect site photograph can raise questions about whether supporting documents match the actual site under assessment.

Council's information management team has been conducting a line-by-line audit of affected records since mid-June. The scale of the problem is not trivial. Internal figures presented at Tuesday's meeting, as described in council's published meeting notes, indicate more than 340 individual DA records on the portal were flagged during an initial automated scan as carrying suspect image attachments. That scan covered applications lodged between October 2025 and May 2026. Records outside that window have not yet been assessed.

The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue has been in informal contact with council about the episode. The facility, which researches digital systems for built-environment management, has previously worked with local councils on data governance. No formal engagement has been announced, but the connection underlines how a problem that looks like routine IT housekeeping has attracted interest from researchers focused on planning system reliability.

Remediation Timeline and Practical Impacts

Council's digital services unit has set a target of July 25 to complete manual replacement of all confirmed duplicate images within the flagged 340-record batch. A broader retrospective audit covering applications going back to January 2024 is expected to begin in August, with completion scheduled before the end of the third quarter. Applicants whose DAs fall within the affected date range — October 2025 to May 2026 — can contact the council's customer service centre on Burelli Street to request a manual check of their file.

For residents in suburbs currently seeing high DA volumes — Keiraville, Mount Keira Road corridor and the Port Kembla renewal precinct among them — the practical advice from council's published guidance is straightforward: if you submitted a DA in that window, download your lodgement receipt, confirm your application number, and use the portal's feedback function to flag any image discrepancy you spot yourself. Self-reporting has already helped council identify roughly 60 of the 340 flagged records, according to the meeting notes.

Sydney recorded its hottest June since 1859 this week, and the Illawarra's own June temperature data from the Bureau of Meteorology station at Albion Park has also shown anomalously warm overnight minimums. That is background noise for most Wollongong council staff, but it does add urgency to any planning system that needs to work smoothly — development applications for shade structures, cooling retrofits and renewable energy installations at Port Kembla have all increased in volume this year. A reliable, accurate portal is not an abstract goal.

Council has not indicated whether the software vendor responsible for the 2025 migration will bear any remediation cost. That question is expected to come before a future council meeting, the published notes state, once the full audit scope is known.