Smith, Warner pivotal players in pay talks

Australia's captain Steven Smith and his deputy David Warner have chosen not to enter into a public debate ahead of the next round of meetings in pay negotiations between Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers Association.

Having been wined and dined by CA board directors in Melbourne on Wednesday night, Smith and Warner elected only to make conciliatory noises after the end of the Chappell-Hadlee series against New Zealand. Their words were in contrast to the more urgent tone taken by others, including the ACA chief executive Alistair Nicholson and the former Australian international Simon Katich.

"For us it was a good opportunity to meet the board and have a nice dinner with them and a good chat," Smith said of the dinner, the sort of courtesy that was not offered to Nicholson, among others. "They took our points of view, we listened to them and it was nice to see everyone on the same page and trying to get the best for our game moving forward."

Sitting alongside Smith, Warner chimed in to say: "Dinner was nice."

While CA declined to comment publicly on the MOU negotiations, there is a wide expectation that the board will seek to break-up the revenue sharing model that has been fundamental to Australian cricket since 1997. Under that model, Australia's players get around 26% of Australian Cricket Revenue, a selection of the money generated by the game that is decided upon by CA.

The ACA is seeking the retention of the model while also hoping to expand and "future-proof" the sources of revenue. This is partly designed to cater for the inclusion of more expansive women's pay in the next MOU, at a time when the game is expanding in professionalism and prominence via the Women's Big Bash League.

Smith, Warner and other senior Australian players are critical to negotiations because it is believed that CA will try to tempt them into accepting considerable individual pay rises in exchange for the revenue sharing model being stripped away. In this, the model would be similar to that presently in use for the women, who are paid separately by CA without a wide range of conditions and benefits open to the men via their longer standing MOU agreements.

Another key figure in the debate is the former captain Mark Taylor, who forged a middle path between the players and the board when a pay dispute in 1997 was defused by the adoption of the revenue sharing model and the founding of the ACA itself. Now a board director, Taylor is also known to be a mentor of Smith, and a proponent of the move away from revenue sharing.

The CA chairman David Peever was previously the managing director of the mining giant Rio Tinto's Australian operations and an outspoken critic of union involvement in the workplace. In a 2012 mining conference address, Peever had outlined his views on "third party" involvement in negotiations between employers and employees.

"Direct engagement between companies and employees, flexibility and the need for improved productivity has to be at the heart of the system," he said at the time. "Only then can productivity and innovation be liberated from the shop floor-up, and without the competing agenda of a third party constantly seeking to extend its reach into areas best left to management."

CA's negotiating team is being led by the executive general manager of strategy and people, Kevin Roberts - himself a former board director. The ACA is expected to seek the advice of the former players association chief executives Tim May and Paul Marsh at various points of the process.