Treasurer and Industrial Relations Minister Gladys Berejiklian was in the city yesterday at the invitation of Northern Tablelands MP Adam Marshall, visiting multinational company Uniplan Group, and speaking to a chamber of commerce forum.

Mrs Berejiklian, on her first visit to the region since being appointed the state’s first female treasurer, said the forum was a chance to brief local businesses on the economic outlook and direction for the state, as well as hearing about the particular concerns and challenges of doing business in regional areas.

She said the statistics had been showing a net growth in jobs in the state’s regions, including the New England, but businesses at yesterday’s forum said potential employees in certain areas just weren’t there.

“It was made very clear to me that there were jobs around, but being able to get people into those jobs was not always possible locally, and they were forced to look outside the region,” Mrs Berejiklian said.

The vexed issue of payroll tax was another concern raised by those at the lunch, she said, which fed into the bigger federal picture of economic reform, a key objective for new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who’s convened a mini-summit on the issue in Canberra today.

Mrs Berejiklian said the state government was right behind the push by the new PM, and she and other state treasurers were meeting on the same issue in a few weeks’ time.

She agreed tax reform was a big part of it, with the opportunity there to reduce duplication between the various levels of governments and spell out very clearly who was responsible for what.

Mrs Berejiklian handed down her first budget in June, and had the satisfaction of announcing a surplus for the first time since her government came into power.

The government had worked hard to get into that position, the treasurer said, and would have to work even harder in the next few years to minimise the damage from savage federal government cuts to the states’ health and education funding, due to come into effect in the 2017/18 financial year.

She said she still remained optimistic her federal counterparts could rethink the cuts – “the federal government has said it is open to considering what (the states) put to them” – but in the meantime 2017/18 loomed large.

“There’s no doubt we will feel the impact ... on our budget,” Mrs Berejiklian said.

“We’ve worked hard to get into surplus ... and we can’t afford to take our foot off the pedal now, continuing with the same focus and discipline that got us to this point.”