Australia will not commit public money to any World Cup bid overseen by FIFA until football's world governing body is reformed, Sport Minister Sussan Ley has vowed.
In a statement issued following Sepp Blatter's announcement in Zurich on Tuesday that he would resign as FIFA president, Ms Ley said the time had come to confront corruption in the organisation.
"Sport is ultimately about the participants, fans and the love of the game, not individual interests, and corruption of any form has no place," Ms Ley said.
"Many within world football have long campaigned for this as an opportunity to tackle these allegations of long-standing corruption in the game head on and the time for action has now well and truly arrived, regardless of who is elected the next president of FIFA."
Mr Blatter's resignation announcement follows last week's dramatic police raid on a five star Zurich hotel in which seven FIFA officials were arrested and held for extradition to the United States on corruption charges, and came less than a week after Mr Blatter was re-elected to a fifth four-year term as president.
A special meeting of FIFA's member nations will be called to elect a new president, but because FIFA's rules require member nations to be given at least four months' notice for such a meeting, an election is unlikely to take place before December.
Ms Ley said the government, along with all Australians, trusted the Football Federation of Australia would "continue to use their vote for positive change and reform".
The federation last week used its vote to support Mr Blatter's only challenger, Jordanian Prince Ali bin Al-Hussein.
Ms Ley said last week's revelations had confirmed her view that Australia could not once again bid for a World Cup until FIFA had been reformed.
"This, more than ever, resolves my view that appropriate governance reforms at FIFA must be undertaken, and succeed, before Australia could ever entrust taxpayer dollars towards any bid overseen by FIFA," she said.
At a Senate hearing late on Tuesday night, Commonwealth officials confirmed the government had provided $42.25 million for Australia's failed bid for the 2022 World Cup, which was awarded to Qatar.
But the officials said a $500,000 payment from the Football Federation of Australia, which is alleged to have been stolen by former FIFA president Jack Warner, had not come from these funds.
Mr Warner has been charged by US authorities with eight counts of corruption.
The Australian Federal Police is assessing allegations that Mr Warner stole the money, which FFA paid in 2010 into a football association bank account Mr Warner controlled, ostensibly for a stadium upgrade in Trinidad and Tobago.
Andrew Stuart, a deputy secretary of the federal Department of Health, which has responsibility for sport, said the department would fully cooperate with the AFP investigation.
"We're aware there's some fairly fishy business associated with these bids," Mr Stuart said.
But officials said the $500,000 payment had come from FFA's funds and not the public money provided to the federation for the World Cup bid, which had been "fully acquitted".
"It was fully acquitted at the time, we were satisfied with that acquittal at the time, and there is at the moment no specific allegation of any kind relating to that funding," Mr Stuart said.
"At this particular moment, there is no chain of funding or chain of control between the federal government funding and the money which was misplaced into Mr Warner's account.
"There is no link there."
