Property owners across Brisbane's growth corridors speak out as duplicate image errors cloud development approvals

A frustrating administrative problem is stalling development applications across South East Queensland, with property owners in Brisbane's fastest-growing corridors reporting that duplicate image attachments in digital lodgement systems are triggering automatic rejections and leaving files stuck in processing queues for weeks. The issue has surfaced repeatedly since the Queensland government rolled out expanded digital planning portals in early 2025, and affected residents say it is getting worse, not better, as the 2032 Olympic infrastructure pipeline drives a surge in renovation and secondary dwelling applications.

The timing matters. South East Queensland added roughly 50,000 new residents in the 12 months to March 2026, according to Queensland Treasury population estimates, with the Logan and Ipswich corridors absorbing a disproportionate share of that growth as families priced out of inner-Brisbane suburbs look further south and west. That pressure has translated into a record volume of development applications — and any systemic glitch in how those applications are processed hits a community that can least afford the hold-up.

What residents are actually experiencing

In Richlands, a suburb sitting on the boundary of Brisbane City Council and Ipswich City Council jurisdictions, home owners describe uploading site plans and supporting photographs through the MyDAS2 portal only to receive automated rejection notices citing duplicate image files — even when applicants say they submitted each document once. The same pattern has been reported by residents in Woodridge, Beenleigh, and parts of inner-west Brisbane including Oxley and Darra, all areas currently seeing elevated small-lot development linked to Queensland's Housing and Homelessness Action Plan.

Community members contacted by The Daily Brisbane describe scenarios where a secondary dwelling application, carrying a council lodgement fee of $1,178 for a standard residential class in Brisbane City Council's 2025–26 fee schedule, gets rejected automatically within hours, forcing a manual re-submission and bumping the file to the back of the queue. Several say they have paid private planning consultants an additional $400 to $800 to repackage documents in a format the portal will accept. One Woodridge owner described losing a fixed-price builder contract after delays pushed approval past the contract's validity window.

Logan City Council's planning division and Brisbane City Council's Development Services branch both field these complaints, though the underlying digital portal infrastructure is administered at state level through the Department of State Development and Infrastructure. Neighbourhood planning networks including the Logan District Community Forum have recorded the issue at multiple meetings this year, with the Beenleigh Community Hub on George Street in Beenleigh used as an informal drop-in point where residents compare notes on navigating the system.

What you can do while the system catches up

Planning consultants operating in the South East Queensland market recommend a specific workaround for now: consolidate all photographic attachments into a single multi-page PDF rather than uploading individual image files, and label each document with a unique alphanumeric prefix before lodgement. The MyDAS2 system's duplicate-detection algorithm is believed to trigger on file size and metadata fingerprints, not on file names alone, so identical phone camera images of the same site taken seconds apart can register as duplicates even if renamed.

The Queensland government's Better Planning program, which was given additional resourcing in the 2025–26 state budget to modernise digital planning infrastructure, is the vehicle most likely to address the underlying system fault. Residents and consultants say a formal fix will require a patch to the portal's file-ingestion layer, not just updated lodgement guidance. Until that happens, applicants are advised to contact their local council's development services counter directly after any automated rejection to request manual review — Brisbane City Council's City Planning and Sustainability team operates a counter at 266 George Street in the CBD — rather than waiting for the portal to process a second automatic attempt, which can extend delays by a further two to four weeks.

With the Olympic construction pipeline expected to keep development application volumes elevated through at least 2028, the window for fixing this problem without broader disruption is narrowing fast.