and reading it from file every execution seems silly

Perl is quite good at loading small files into internal structures quickly. Just a few lines of code and that's it. (And the performance penalty for reading it from file is minimal because the files are small and simple.)

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

chomp(my @data = <DATA>);
my %states = map { my ($p,$c,$s) = split /\|/;
                   $p => [ $c, $s ] } @data;

print Dumper(\%states);

__DATA__
3000|Melbourne|VIC
2000|Sydney|NSW
[download]

and the output is

$VAR1 = {
          '3000' => [
                      'Melbourne',
                      'VIC'
                    ],
          '2000' => [
                      'Sydney',
                      'NSW'
                    ]
        };
[download]