Supply Nation chief executive Kate Russell told the Connect gala dinner in Boorloo / Perth on Wednesday night that next year the event would be "coming home" to Gadigal.

The applause from the largely Western Australian audience of 1,300 people was sporadic. MC Narelda Jacobs, a Whadjuk Noongar woman, picked it up from the stage a moment later, telling Russell she thought the room had made itself heard loud and clear: Connect should come back to Western Australia.

Home, in that sentence, means head office, and there is no fault in that. Supply Nation was established in 2009 as the Australian Indigenous Minority Supplier Council by Sydney-based Michael McLeod, a Ngarrindjeri Monaro man, and co-founder Dug Russell, launching at Parliament House that September and taking its current name in 2012 after completing its pilot. The first Connect saw 13 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses exhibit. In 2012 the organisation opened a Western Australian presence, which its own history describes as the first step towards a national footprint.

Moving a national tradeshow and gala 3,000 kilometres from head office is a serious undertaking. It takes staff, sponsors, venue partners and a board willing to wear the risk, and Supply Nation has only recently reached the scale where all of that lines up. The organisation deserves credit for making the call and getting it right. More than 230 exhibitors filled the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre on Wednesday, and Supply Nation put the Western Australian share of businesses showcasing at more than 60 per cent.

The most common remark I heard over two days had nothing to do with procurement. It was about the flight. Delegates from Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and further afield told me the same thing in a dozen different ways: it was their first time in Boorloo / Perth, they never get over here, they had no idea it took so long. One told me he had spent longer in the air getting to Connect than he had at his last international conference in Aotearoa / New Zealand. It was said cheerfully every time, and meant warmly, and it landed on a venue full of people who take those flights many times a year - sometime multiple times a month.

Western Australia's senior Indigenous business leaders know the cost of these trips in detail. They know which flights let you arrive in time for an afternoon meeting in Sydney and which ones cost you a full day. They know what the fares do to a travel budget over twelve months, and what two days out of the business costs when the crew is on site.

For operators in the north west it is worse again. A director in Karratha, Port Hedland or Broome flies to Perth first, waits, then crosses the country, which turns a Sydney meeting into two days of travel each way before anyone opens a laptop or buys a coffee. This is the price of doing national business from the Pilbara or from Perth.

The question now is what happens next, and here the numbers speak plainly.

Western Australian Indigenous businesses received more than $2.1 billion in procurement spend from Supply Nation's government and corporate members in 2024-25. The national figure for the same period was $5.83 billion. One state accounted for 36 per cent of it.

"In many ways WA is punching above its representative weight," Russell told the Indigenous Business Review (a National Indigenous Times publication) at the conference.

"It's not just the procurement spend, it's also the innovation. We know that there are some incredible stories here happening about enduring partnerships, about land rights and about innovative financing solutions."

The pattern runs through the whole state economy. Western Australia is home to just over 3 million people, 11 per cent of the country. It accounted for 17 per cent of the national economy in 2024-25, more than 1.5 times its population share, and recorded the strongest domestic economic growth of all mainland states that year. The state generates more than 45 per cent of national exports, worth $238.4 billion over the year to February, and its domestic economy has grown 27 per cent in five years. It also transferred around $2.7 billion to other states through the GST in 2025-26.

Aboriginal businesses in WA are built into that machinery. They service the iron ore and gas operations that generate those export figures, and they carry the civil works, logistics, environmental services, fleet management, labour hire and maintenance contracts underneath them. The money that flows east through the GST passes through their invoices first.

So the ask is modest and specific. Now that Supply Nation has shown it can stage Connect in the west, Western Australia should appear on a published rotation, hosting at least every third year, with the schedule set far enough ahead that businesses can budget for it. The request is simply that a state as important as Western Australia not be left off the future calendar.

The case for this argument was strongest on the tradeshow floor.

I spoke to owner after owner on Wednesday who told me the same thing: they would not have paid to exhibit in Sydney or Melbourne, and the event coming to them was what made it viable. The maths is simple. A stall on the east coast means freight, courier costs, accommodation, flights for two or three staff and a week out of the business. For a company turning over a few million dollars with a crew on the tools, that is a real decision about whether the growth is worth it. Plenty of good businesses decide it isn't, and the buyers never learn they exist.

There is a sound argument for holding Connect in the east, and it deserves an answer. Supply Nation's 890 buyers are concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne, and a matchmaking event works only if the buyers turn up. The answer is that a national procurement team at a bank, resources company or a federal department flies as a matter of routine and books the travel against a line item. A two-person operator out of WA does not. Buyers travel more easily than small suppliers do, which is a reason to bring the event to the suppliers whenever it is practical to do so.

What the buyers found when they made the trip was a sector already operating at scale.

Main Roads WA set a $700 million Aboriginal procurement target across the state's entire transport portfolio, taking in Westport, the Public Transport Authority, the Department of Transport and the Office of Infrastructure. It landed on $1.1 billion. The agency now has more than 92 Aboriginal businesses on its panel contracts, and Aboriginal employment has climbed from around 1 per cent to between 5 and 6 per cent.

"If a contractor says they are going to spend $10 million or $20 million with Aboriginal businesses, they have to show us exactly how they are going to do it," Main Roads Director of Transport Portfolio Aboriginal Engagement Dennis Kickett told the conference. "We will have those uncomfortable conversations and hold them to account."

Premier Roger Cook took the same message to the gala dinner outlining his vision for a vibrant and thriving Aboriginal business sector.

Western Australian businesses owned by Indigenous women sold $708 million to Supply Nation members, close to half the national total for female-owned suppliers. Seventy-three per cent of WA transactions above $1 million went to businesses owned by women. That is the least reported number of the week and the most instructive one.

The year ahead will test all of it. The Commonwealth has lifted its Indigenous Procurement Policy threshold from 50 per cent Indigenous ownership to 51 per cent ownership and control, a change Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy told the conference was designed to back First Nations entrepreneurs to exercise full authority over their businesses. Supply Nation already certifies at that higher bar and registers businesses at 50 per cent, so the operators most affected are those sitting in the registered tier.

The transition will be felt keenly in the west. Joint ventures between Aboriginal businesses and established contractors are a standard entry route into resources and civil work in this state, and many were structured to the 50 per cent line because it has been common practice over the last 15 years in deals between resource companies and Indigenous suppliers and traditional-owner businesses. Moving it means renegotiating shareholder agreements with partners who hold the balance sheet, the plant and the incumbent contract. KingKira founder Tammy O'Connor described exactly that negotiation in her opening keynote, and she won it. Not every operator has her leverage.

"A short-term priority for us is making sure that our Indigenous businesses are supported through that transition as much as we possibly can," Russell said.

That support needs to be specific: legal and accounting advice to restructure, a clear transition window, and buyers who hold contracts open rather than quietly reclassifying suppliers who fall outside the new definition. The businesses most exposed are the ones furthest from Canberra and Sydney, in the Pilbara, the Kimberley and the Goldfields.

Russell finished her interview with the Indigenous Business Review team on the operators themselves.

"I hope that our individual entrepreneurs get to have the success that they want. For some of them that might just be putting food on the table, and for others might aspire to world domination."

Both were in the room on Wednesday night, alongside this year's Supplier Diversity Award winners. Supply Nation proved it can bring the country to Western Australia, and the sector here proved it was worth the trip. The task now is to make sure that the next one is already on the calendar.