Well the distance between Perth and Sydney is similar to New York and SF. And pings between NY and SF are usually in the same range ~(70-90ms) so not too shabby

Yep, this is actually quite good. I see 90+ in some cases in Sydney so this is good.

I also see extremely good download speeds when testing from EC2 (it capped my connection instantly).

Out of interest, how does that compare with Perth to AWS Singapore? There are direct fibre links in both cases and there's not much in it distance wise.

Lots of Australian ISPs route to Asia via the US. So it's a coinflip as to whether any particular customer will see much better pings, or much worse pings, if you host in Singapore/Tokyo.

I'm not sure about Perth, but from AWS Sydney I'm seeing pings of around 400ms to AWS Singapore.

People who understand these things a lot better than I do always tell me that pings aren't a reliable measure of network latency.