Newcastle City Council confirmed this week it has begun a staged cleanup of duplicate and incorrectly tagged images lodged across its NSW Planning Portal submissions, a backlog that had grown to more than 14,000 redundant files across active development applications in the Hunter region. The audit, which started Monday, targets DA files stretching back to 2021 when the state government mandated digital lodgement for most residential and commercial proposals.
The timing matters. June recorded its hottest temperatures in NSW since the 1850s, and with that came a spike in development enquiries along Newcastle's coast — Merewether, Bar Beach and Redhead among the most active — as landowners rushed to get assessments lodged before potential new coastal hazard overlays take effect later this year. That surge exposed an existing problem: applicants and assessment officers were wading through duplicate site photographs, some files containing the same image uploaded six or seven times, adding hours to already stretched processing queues.
How the Duplicates Accumulated
The problem has a mundane origin. When the NSW Planning Portal updated its file-upload interface in March 2024, a browser compatibility glitch with older versions of Safari caused images to register as uploaded while continuing to cycle through a loading screen. Many applicants simply clicked upload again. Council's development assessment unit, based at the Civic Centre on King Street, estimates roughly 34 percent of DA files lodged between March and October 2024 contain at least one duplicate image set.
The Hunter and Central Coast Regional Planning Panel, which handles applications valued above $5 million, flagged the issue formally in a memo circulated to member councils in May this year. The University of Newcastle's GeoInformatics research group — which has an existing data partnership with council under the 2023 Smart Hunter initiative — was contracted in June to build a hash-matching script capable of scanning portal files and flagging pixel-identical images for removal without deleting genuine supporting documentation. That contract was valued at $47,500.
Maitland City Council and Lake Macquarie City Council are running parallel cleanups using the same toolset, coordinated through the Hunter Joint Organisation, which has its secretariat in Newcastle's CBD. Between the three councils, the combined duplicate file count is estimated at just under 40,000 images.
What Gets Fixed, and When
Council's digital services team says the automated pass should be complete by July 18. A manual review phase covering files the algorithm flags as uncertain — where images are near-identical but not pixel-perfect, such as two photos taken seconds apart from the same angle — will run through to August 8.
For anyone with a DA currently sitting in the queue, the practical effect is that assessment officers will not be touching substantive parts of those applications during the audit window. Council's website updated its lodgement FAQ on Thursday to reflect an expected processing delay of five to eight business days for applications lodged between now and July 18. Applicants with time-sensitive projects can request a manual bypass through council's customer service desk at 282 King Street, though staff confirmed the bypass queue already had 23 requests logged by Friday morning.
The cleanup also has implications for the Port of Newcastle's precinct development work. The port's masterplan submissions, several of which were lodged digitally during the 2024 glitch window, are among the files flagged for review. Port staff met with council's assessment unit on Wednesday to map the overlap.
Longer term, council says it will push the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure to mandate browser-agnostic upload validation on the state portal before the next major interface update. A submission to that effect is expected to go before the full council meeting on July 28. The Hunter Joint Organisation intends to co-sign it, which would give the request the weight of seven member councils behind it.
