Australian cricket beware: The mistake the game must not make

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In 2011, the late David Crawford and I carried out a governance review for the Cricket Australia board.

Our recommendations were clear – that the states are cricket’s shareholders, but that Cricket Australia’s board must be independent.

States should not appoint their own people to the CA board. Rather, a process should be put in place whereby the states, as shareholders, collectively appoint the board and include in it the best possible combination of skills and experiences. In this way, board members will have the support of all the states because, effectively, each state has right of veto over any candidate that does not have their trust.

“Representative” boards embed serious conflicts of interest into the workings of the board, and this is poisonous to a board’s long-term performance. Crawford and I heard this concern many times during our work, and the word “trust” came up on countless occasions.

Basically, the case then – and it remains the same – was that each state needed their own person to be on the CA board to protect their own interests. There was little trust that the CA board, as........

© The Sydney Morning Herald