More heads could roll at Cricket Australia as cheating scandal grinds on
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Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, now president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, told ABC News from Hong Kong that the scandal was harming Australia's international reputation outside cricket circles.
"People have approached me in the last week in China and in the United States — not known to be big centres of international cricket — but have seen the massive global media coverage of this and have come out with one thing, 'we never thought you Australians cheated at things like this'," Mr Rudd said.
"I think the recent chairmanship of Cricket Australia, under David Peever, opens up a whole series of questions, I mean Peever brought to Australian cricket what I describe as all the delicacy and sophisticated stagecraft of Rio Tinto — I say that with complete irony.
"In fact I think he imported into Cricket Australia some of the highest-level corporate thuggery we've seen on the part of some of our Australian senior mining industry officials over a long period of time.
But when you're dealing with something as precious as an Australian institution, and whether we like it or not Australian cricket is an institution … it requires a level of delicacy I've never seen on the part of David Peever in handling anything," he said.
