Against a backdrop of rising geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainty, the Indo-Pacific’s fast-growing digital economies are looking for infrastructure that can deliver both cost efficiency and ESG-aligned resilience.

In this context, Western Australia is drawing increasing interest for the foundations that matter: clean and reliable energy, critical minerals for high-performance chips, global connectivity, secure and scalable compute, lower operating costs for business, and a stable, trusted operating environment.

This session will explore how WA can convert these advantages into long-term strategic value for the state and international markets: offering internationally competitive services while supporting local industries and SMEs, creating future jobs, attracting investment, strengthening sustainable development, and positioning the state as a trusted hub in the region for next-generation digital infrastructure. It will also examine how public and private sectors and academia can work together to unlock this opportunity and ensure the benefits build a stronger regional economy.

The “next economy” is already here (but not evenly distributed) with AI in everyday services, new digital markets through tokenisation, quantum-driven security upgrades, and green infrastructure powering modern compute. But not all growth stories are sustainable, and bubbles do happen (is AI due for a reset? Is Quantum finally ready?). That leaves a simple question for everyone—from mums and dads, VCs and family offices to Australia’s super funds:

What does this mean for savings, wealth, retirement and the kind of economy we’re building?

This roundtable brings together investors, technologists and researchers, regulators and practitioners to separate durable value from hype, and to define what high-return, responsible investing looks like under real uncertainty.

We also ask the hard questions: if some jobs disappear or shift, how do large funds still deliver for members and the broader economy—not just short-term winners?

Indo-Pacific Unplugged is a closed-door executive tabletop simulation that treats international digital connectivity—especially undersea cables—as critical infrastructure for the modern economy. The exercise stress-tests scenarios of degraded or disrupted connectivity and the cascading impacts across national security, transport and logistics, communications, utilities, finance and payments, and health services.

Australia is the scenario “home base,” with Western Australia as the live stress-test environment—anchored by Perth, one of the world’s most geographically isolated capital cities, which makes WA a uniquely valuable resilience laboratory for the Indo-Pacific. WA is rapidly strengthening its position as a green digital infrastructure and connectivity hub—linking renewable energy, data centre growth, subsea routes, and sovereign-grade capability. This simulation highlights the benefits of that trajectory while pressure-testing the assumptions it relies on, including degraded-mode operations, cross-sector coordination, and the role of decentralised / distributed networks as additional layers of continuity when “always-on connectivity” cannot be taken for granted.

Participants will stress-test realistic scenarios involving partial degradation or temporary loss of international connectivity, and work through the operational choices that follow—what to prioritise, what to throttle, what to switch to, how to coordinate across sectors, and how to communicate credibly under uncertainty. This simulation prepares leaders for decision-readiness in extreme situations where there is no time to prepare.

Following the precedent of Iceland’s “Unplugged” exercise and similar industry-led resilience simulations, this session is designed to surface hidden dependencies, identify second- and third-order impacts, improve public–private coordination, and generate a short list of practical mitigations that organisations can act on immediately.