The board of Cricket Tasmania has condemned the treatment of former Test captain Tim Paine by Cricket Australia (CA), after his resignation due to a sexting scandal on Friday.

Tim Paine stood down as captain after it was revealed he had been involved in a text-messaging exchange with a former female Cricket Tasmania employee in 2017.

Cricket Tasmania chairman Andrew Gaggin put out a statement this afternoon saying anger amongst the Tasmanian cricket community at the treatment of Paine was "palpable".

He said Paine, a Tasmanian, had been instrumental in salvaging the reputation of the national team after the Cape Town sandpaper ball-tampering scandal in 2018.

"The treatment afforded to the Australian Test captain by Cricket Australia has been appalling and the worst since Bill Lawry over 50 years ago."

Lawry became the first Australian Test cricket captain to be dropped from a team midway through a series — finding out his fate after it was reported on the radio, rather than from team selectors.

A Cricket Australia investigation in 2018 cleared Paine of any breach of the code of conduct over the text message exchange.

On Saturday, the current chair of Cricket Australia, Richard Freudenstein said if the current board had been in place in 2018 then, faced with the same circumstances, Cricket Australia would not have endorsed Paine as men's Test captain.

The Cricket Tasmania board met on Monday afternoon and put out a statement today.  

"The Cricket Tasmania board reaffirmed its view that Paine should not have been put in a position where he felt the need to resign over an incident that was determined by an independent inquiry at the time to not be a breach of the code of conduct and was a consensual and private exchange that occurred between two mature adults and was not repeated," Gaggin said.

Paine made his return to competitive cricket on Monday, after six months on the sidelines with a neck injury and recovery from surgery.

Playing for Tasmania's second XI against South Australia in Hobart, Paine took six catches on day one, before getting out today LBW on his second ball, for one run.

CA investigation into Paine 'bulletproof' 

Nick Cummins was the chief executive of Cricket Tasmania between 2017 and the end of 2019.

Earlier in the day, he told SEN that he supported the Cricket Australia investigation.

"I think the process that the Cricket Australia Integrity [Unit] undertook at the time was bulletproof," he said.

Mr Cummins, who is now the Cricket Victoria boss, said it was the right call to leave Paine in the captain's position.

"There's decisions in cold blood and there's decisions in warm blood, so often, you know, three years down the track you're making decisions in cold blood and you can be a lot more dispassionate perhaps than when you're right in the centre of it," he said.

Ethics panel agreed to but never established

The Ethics Centre's Simon Longstaff conducted a cultural review of Cricket Australia after the South Africa ball-tampering incident.

One of his recommendations was for CA to establish an ethics commission — essentially a group of people without vested interests who could look at the complex ethical issues that arise in sport and advise boards.

Cricket Australia agreed, but an ethics commission has not been established.

Dr Longstaff said such a commission would have been extremely useful in 2018, and now, in regards to the Tim Paine matter.

He said sporting codes needed to work out what they stood for and what ethical standard they held their players to, in part to avoid bowing to pressure from the public or a noisy stakeholder.

"Now, what that standard should be, becomes a very interesting question," Dr Longstaff said.

Dr Longstaff said it was perfectly appropriate for Paine to decide to resign last week.

"He put the wellbeing of his sport, of his teammates, before his own interests and that is the kind of call you would expect from a good captain," he said.

"But whether or not it ever had to come to that point is an important question."

Catharine Lumby, a professor of media at Sydney University who has been a long-time gender adviser with the NRL, said there might have been good reasons for keeping the Paine issue confidential at the time.

"But I think now that it's come out it would be very good to have an independent review," she said.

She said disputes between the current and former boards over decision-making were unhelpful.

"It's a little bit like when there's a broken vase and the two kids argue about whose fault it was," she said.

"The vase is broken. Let's fix it."