Would someone mind explaining to me why this is?

Because that is what strict was designed to do! You are using a symbolic reference which is almost always a bad idea. You can use hard refs (code refercences in this case) with strict perfectly OK. Perhaps you wanted something like this for use as a dispatch table:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my %lists = (
      'test1'    => { func => \&test1, data => 'stuff' },
      'test2'    => { func => \&test2, data => 'things' },
);

for my $key (keys %lists) {
   my $code_ref = $lists{$key}->{func};
   my $data     = $lists{$key}->{data};
   &$code_ref($data);   #  or use this syntax:  $code_ref->($data);
}

sub test1 {  print "New message '$_[0]' for test1\n"; }
sub test2 {  print "New message '$_[0]' for test2\n"; }

__DATA__
New message 'stuff' for test1
New message 'things' for test2
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