Forget Sydney. The real front door to Australia’s digital future is Perth. Closer to Singapore than the eastern seaboard, WA is ideally placed to anchor the nation’s most important new industry: data.

Almost all of Australia’s international digital traffic — 99 per cent — runs through undersea cables. Most of it is routed east, through the Coral and Tasman seas. That leaves us dangerously exposed. Diverse routes landing in WA would not only improve speed but also provide the nation with resilience against sabotage or natural disasters. Perth could become the secure digital gateway between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the rest of Australia.

And where the cables land, data centres follow. These vast, windowless fortresses store and process the information that drives everything from b

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