2 hours ago
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Colin Carter
July 3, 2026 — 7:45pm
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 comprised at the time, could be relied on to do the right thing as far as that state was concerned.
At the time, it was ironic to note that in the AFL Commission there had never been a commissioner from Queensland and yet the AFL was spending huge amounts on developing football in Queensland. That it could do this was due to the independence of its commissioners, with none beholden to sectional interests.
Our recommendations in 2011 were quickly watered down by the states and what emerged was a bit of a hybrid – the states each nominated their own person to the CA board, and several independent members were also to be appointed. But the drag of state self-interest was still embedded into the board’s design.
Today, following the debates over private ownership, there is talk of even pushing back on the structures that have been agreed. The much-admired Greg Chappell has argued that the CA board go back to including state appointees who could also hold positions in their state structures. This is pure representative board territory and doing this would be a terrible mistake for cricket.
All of the evidence from the corporate and non-profit world is that the “independent board” is the much more effective model. Boards with built-in conflicts of interest will often not reach the best decisions, in the best interests of the game.
Board design should also be based on a real understanding of underlying economics. Let’s be clear – there is only one cricket business in Australia, and that is the national one. There is no self-sustaining economic model that is only intra-state; intra-state cricket is how money is spent, not earned. The only cricket “business” that earns serious money in Australia is a national one – either state versus state or international matches. Governance design must reflect that fact, or gross distortions will come into play.
The states are the shareholders. They own the Australian game. They should then appoint an independent board, free of state conflicts of interest, and charged with developing the game in the national interest. The states should agree a process whereby the CA board is selected, one that provides the best possible skill base – and every person on that board should have the support of all states. And if the situation arises, a simple majority of the states can remove a director or even the whole board. That’s the ultimate safeguard for shareholders’ rights.
Representative boards might work in private companies, but they don’t work in public companies or in public institutions.
I have seen both – up close. A fair bit of my advisory work over the past few decades has been spent trying to get rid of representative boards. And I have been members of them too: before joining the AFL Commission (that is independent, following the Crawford report of 1993) I was a member of the VFL’s board of directors, when each club had its own representative. It didn’t work and was seen to be inadequate to football’s challenges. That board was done away with, and the independent board (the commission) put in its place.
Australian cricket faces many challenges. Governance wisdom is very clear – the independent board is by far the best way to go. It might not get all decisions right, but that is also true of the representative board. And its chances of getting things right are much improved because the drag of self-interest is mostly removed from consideration.
Colin Carter is an advisor to boards on governance and is also a former AFL club president and AFL Commissioner.
