Many athletes, according to Howman, are telling WADA that cheats should be banned for life if found guilty of doping. Yet Howman's sense is that there are many sporting organisations still paying lip service to the topic.

"If you don't [agree], try to convince me why you don't," Howman told an audience of pre-eminent sports lawyers, legal advisers and chiefs from Australia's top sporting codes, including the AFL and NRL, assembled at the 25th Australian and New Zealand Sports Law Association conference.

"How can you change that? Don't we need an independent body to oversee the governance of sport? To ensure that issues of bribery, corruption and all the other challenges to integrity can be pursued.

"How big a disaster do you need to start reflecting on the issue of governance? How big a disaster do you need to look at issues of integrity and what's going on?

This view, he said, was in light of the exposure of deep corruption in soccer's world governing body, FIFA, which Howman described as "leaderless" and "rudderless".

He said threatening athletes with prison time struck him as far more compelling than even a four-year ban from sport.

"I want to pose the question: should doping be a criminal matter?" he said. "It is in Italy, and we think – some of us – that the real deterrent that cheating athletes fear is the fear of going to prison. Not the fear of being stood down from their sport for a year, two years, four years but a fear of going to prison."

On the topic of the CAS, which is set to rule next month on whether 34 current and retired AFL players took banned drugs when participants of a program run at Essendon Football Club, Howman said: "When sport decided they should have a sport-based tribunal, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, it was based on three clear principles: easy access for the athletes, non-expensive access for the athletes ... and timely justice.

"Now we're involved in hearings before CAS which might take a couple of years, and none of the three principles are being followed. It's costing more.

"We need to look at how we can change things, and I think, looking at the current climate that I confronted when I got off the plane here in Melbourne, this is probably the place where it might start."