Adelaide has just made a new enemy and his name is Dominic Perrottet.

Not many South Australians will know who he is, and nor should they, he’s the treasurer of NSW and today, about 1400km from the South Australian capital.

As he was talking up his home state in a press conference, Mr Perrottet boldly declared that “nobody wants to go and live in Adelaide”.

It came as he and the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian were talking about the impact of immigration on Sydneysiders and how they wanted to give the Harbour City a “breather” so it could catch up on infrastructure.

“The reality is, simply adding more people is not a sound economic policy going forward. It’s lazy economics,” the treasurer said.

“With Canberra, they all bear no responsibility when it comes to the rates of immigration. They get the benefit of income tax, but we have to pick up the tab for the infrastructure off the back of it.

“The reality is, when people come to Australia, nobody wants to go and live in Adelaide. That’s just a reality. They want to live in Sydney and Melbourne.”

The smackdown comes just days after he likened some Australian states to call centres and lunch rooms and described the past 200 years in other states as “pretty unremarkable”.

On Wednesday, told the Business Council of Australia that NSW was born to be the “premier state”.

“If NSW is the head office of Australia, South Australia is the call centre, Victoria the maintenance department and Queensland the lunch room,” he said.

“Sydney is our most exceptional city and NSW our most exceptional state.

“In Western Australia, prosperity comes almost entirely from digging things out of the ground and selling them. Queensland is much the same.

“And apart from the rust belt manufacturing state of Victoria, the other states have had a solid but pretty unremarkable 200 years.”

According to economic modelling commissioned by the Property Council of Australia, the NSW economy could grow by $130 billion less over the coming decade if net migration to the state was halved.

But Professor James Raymer, from the Australian National University, has warned that drastically cutting migration to Sydney could make life even more difficult for fatigued residents of overcrowded areas such as Western Sydney as well as regional areas in need of more immigration to sustain their economies and services.

“Migrants are just a distraction to the real problems Australia is facing in term of employment, infrastructure and relative opportunities in regional areas,” Prof Raymer told news.com.au in an interview last month.

“Scott Morrison should be looking at the root causes of these problems rather than pointing the finger at migrants because, by just arbitrarily cutting immigration numbers you make the problem worse for regional communities.”