1) Sack the entire refereeing group, with the Sutton brothers, Archer, and anyone else whose been in a leadership role banned for life. All other refs will return to state leagues
2) Cancel these ridiculous annual rules committees, and burn every “interpretation change” they’ve come up with. The NRL will go back to being adjudicated by the international laws of the game, which are controlled by the RLIF
3) Go back to one referee, and ingoal refs. Video ref remains as an option, although with a challenge system instead which can be initiated by either the captain or coach. challenges must be indicated within a set time period after the disputed play occurs, and will be ruled on at the end of the current set or next stoppage in play
4) go to the QRL’s and NSWRL’s refereeing groups, and ask them to promote their best refs to adjudicate the NRL each week. These refs will remain under the control of their local leagues, with the money previously paid to NRL refs split evenly between the 2 state leagues and used to give referees at all levels a pay rise. Refs that get promoted to the NRL will receive a match payment and travel expenses
As an addendum to this-
5) Demolish the whole concept of "game management". The refs are there to adjudicate the game not to manage the spectacle of it and this idea of game management is basically the soul cause of all of the lack of consistency in refs calls in a game. Sure we'll probably get some dud games for a few weeks with the refs letting nothing go, but after a little while the players and coaches will learn that there's a new sheriff in town and will clean their game up.
6) Go through the rule book and remove every rule that contradicts another rule, e.g. loose carry, dominant tackle, etc, get rid of them as not only do they contradict other rules they just cause confusion and are extremely subjective. They are a grey area when we should be aiming for black and white.
7) At the same time that you're getting rid of the contradictory rules re-word or replace any rule that requires an degree of interpretation and replace it with a black and white ruling. Broadly speaking this has already been done by the NRL, like in the case of obstruction where for a little while there every ref played the rule differently until they came up with a black and white universal way of ruling it (that was completely different to how it had been interpenetrated for 50-60+ years, but still it was an improvement), but there're other examples of this causing problems e.g. what constitutes offside is a good example as some refs like to stand ten meters back at the play the ball with the players behind them being onside, and others like to stand 13 or so meters back with the players in-front of them at roughly the 10 meter mark so they can see them all. The point is streamline all that shit, and make it very clear how it is to be interpenetrated.
8) People are probably not going to like this one, but grant Geoff Toovey's wish... Have a complete investigation of all the current refs bank accounts details and their betting accounts, etc, cause though I'm not suggesting that any particular game is or was fixed it would be incredibly easy for a ref/refs to fix a game in the current circumstances of the NRL and for nobody to blink an eyelid when it's happened. While doing that introduce rules that the NRL has the right to access refs and other officials financial information (and other relevant stuff as well) just like they do with the players to keep them honest. It's sad that we are at that point, but we are at that point where we have no choice but to make sure that we actually can say for certain that some of the goings on in the game have been because of incompetence and not by design.
