Fair enough, Michael. But the Minister for Agriculture is actually the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry - not just agriculture.
And the Minister for IT is Stephen Conroy who has even higher status (he's also the deputy in the Senate). (He is the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy). If they want to set up the NITF I expect they could, but the IT industry lobbies pretty well anyway.
Perhaps there's another example you could use re representation by politicians :)
Agriculture is still very important to our economy even though it's declined in relative importance over the years as other sectors emerge. And it directly feeds into a lot of the manufacturing, biotech, retail and transport sectors, value adding. As well as that, without agriculture we'd have no-one to look after the vast areas of land - so there are a lot of reasons(economic and environmental) why it's pretty important to have someone on the ball in government monitoring it all.
