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Cricket Australia (CA) has put forward a new remuneration proposal which would substantially increase the wages for female players in a bid to end an ongoing pay dispute with the Australian Cricketers' Association (ACA).
The pay offer, for a new Memorandum of Understanding, also addresses the "current underinvestment in the grassroots of the game", according to a statement released by CA on Tuesday.
"We wanted to address the historic disparity between male and female players," CA chief executive James Sutherland said on Tuesday.
"It really is a landmark moment, it's something we're very excited about. It's a landmark moment for cricket and for women's sport in this country.
"It's one thing to talk about supporting women's support, it's another thing to bring it to action, to do something about it.
"It's a really significant step for our sport."
Sutherland said female players would receive an "immediate average pay increase of more than 125 per cent" under the proposal.
"As a result, our international women cricketers will see their average pay increase from $79,000 to $179,000, as of July 1 this year. By 2021, we expect to see our international women cricketers earning an average of $210,000,"" he said.
"And our state female cricketers, playing both WNCL and WBBL, will see their average remuneration more than double from $22,000 to $52,000 this year."
With the emergence of the AFLW and increasing pay rates in netball, CA was under pressure to ensure cricket became a viable career pathway for female athletes.
"Cricket has led the charge on providing a real sporting career path for women, and this offer locks in all that hard work of the past few years," Sutherland said.
"It is truly an historic development which allows us to say with confidence that cricket is a sport for all Australians."
CA said it was confident it could reach an accord with the ACA before the current deal expires on June 30.
"We understand that the ACA prefers the status quo, but CA believes that the model devised in the 1990s, which is based on a fixed percentage of revenue, has served its intended purpose - to make Australia's cricketers some of the best paid sportspeople in the country," Sutherland said.
"It was a means to an end, not something that has to hold us back from providing players with financial certainty, a fair deal for all players including women, and the flexibility to invest in the grassroots of the game.
"This is a landmark agreement. We are now looking forward to sitting down with the ACA to work through the details and we are confident we will be able to announce a completed agreement before June 30."
Male player payments would also increase significantly. Average international men's payments would go up by 25 per cent by 2021/22, and domestic payments would increase by 18 per cent in that same period.
Overall, grassroots cricket funding would go up to $76 million and total player payments grow by up to $108 million in the next five years.
"We want our international men's cricketers to be the best paid team sportsmen in the country," Sutherland said.
"We continue to see the domestic competitions to be the nursery for international cricket."
The current revenue-sharing model has been in place since the first MOU was established in 1998.
Topics: cricket, sport, industrial-relations, melbourne-3000, vic, australia
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