This is a story about how an Australian Prime Minister who was so obsessed with strutting the world stage in sport that he committed $45 million of taxpayers money to a corrupt bidding process to host the FIFA World Cup.

To, in effect, pay for this largesse that ended up in the grubby pockets of corrupt officials and FIFA sanctioned vote-whisperers, this same Prime Minister cut approved funding for projects of national importance for the two rugby codes.

In February 2008 the Australian and National Rugby League NRL put out a media release expressing “disappointment” at the Rudd Government’s decision to withdraw $10 million in funding for Hall of Fame projects in Sydney and Brisbane intended to mark the game’s centenary year in Australia.

The grant had been announced by the then Prime Minister John Howard at the grand final before the 2007 federal election. The then Chief Executive of the NRL, David Gallop, noted that this cancellation of the project involved breaking a “commitment from the government of the day… This is another blow for millions of Australians who would have been able to see ‘the working man’s game’ recognised at a national level.”

At the same time, the new Sports Minister Kate Ellis told a group of rugby officials that the ‘Razor Gang’ had stripped the ARU of its funding promised by the Howard for funding $25 million dollars for a National Rugby Academy at Ballymore.

The proposal for the project had been described by then Sports Minister George Brandis as, “one of the best and more professional project submission I’ve ever seen.” It had been announced at a press conference attended by John Howard, the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, and ARU CEO John O’Neill.

The Howard Government approved the proposal months before the election and had included its funding in the 2007 budget allocation.

It was obvious to the rugby officials at the meeting that Ellis knew little of the detail about the proposal. She was shown the project document and asked if she knew what it was. She said she didn’t. It was clear to everyone present that she had no say on the matter, and no interest apparently. She was repeating her master’s voice, the voice of Kevin Rudd.

The two rugby codes were angry, therefore, that in the 2008 Federal Budget football had been granted $32 million over four years to kick-start a program of building up infrastructure to support Australia’s bid to host a Football World Cup tournament.

Our story concerning FFA’s bid to host a World Cup tournament starts in May 2008, with the 58th FIFA Congress at the Sydney Opera House.

This was a massive event. More than 1000 people, including members from FIFA’s many associations and confederations, as well as hundreds of other officials and observers, gathered to discuss matters like the World Anti-Doping Code, players’ eligibility to play for representative teams and the principle of promotion and relegation.

Like all events of this nature, the official business was a cover for the real purpose of the congress. At a private meeting during the congress, Prime Minister Rudd, along with the chairman and CEO of the Football Federation of Australia, Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley, met with FIFA President and CEO, Sepp Blatter and Jerome Valcke, to push Australia’s claims to host a World Cup tournament – “the greatest show on earth,” according to Rudd.

Lowy told reporters that “President Blatter is already well aware of Australia’s strong track record in hosting major events.” And then, in an obvious effort to wrap the bid up in patriotic colours, Lowy added: “This is for football but, above all, it is for Australia.”

Patriotism, according to the definition offered in Dr Johnson’s dictionary, is the “last refuge of scoundrels”. This is, of course, an over-reaching definition. But it is true that throughout the (justified) controversy over the Australian bid, Rudd, Lowy and the other supporters of the bid, including the football media and community, were quick to imply and sometimes openly express the view that any opposition to the World Cup bid was somehow “unAustralian”.

On 10 December 2008 a joint press release from Kevin Rudd (Prime Minister), The Hon Kate Ellis MP (Minister for Sport) and The Hon Martin Ferguson (Minister for Tourism) announced that FFA would formally lodge the Australian bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Over the three-year bid campaign, the Australian Government committed $45.6 million “to bring the world’s biggest sporting event to Australia”.

During all this self-congratulatory hoopla, there did not seem to be any inclination to investigate what Rudd had effectively signed the Australian taxpayer up for. Effectively, Australia had signed itself up to be a player in an sporting equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that benefited FIFA powerbrokers and their corrupt mates.

At the FIFA Congress in Sydney, Prime Minister Rudd was presented with FIFA’s Presidential Medal by Sepp Blatter. Rudd’s comments to all the Congress participants watching the presentation were a pure gold endorsement of the FIFA bidding process:

“Football brings people together from all corners of the world. Australia is a country of extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity which we are proud of. It is also a country of immigrants. They brought a living passion for football. The Australian government fully supports Australia’s bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup.”

Sepp Blatter’s opening speech to the FIFA Congress should have alerted everyone involved with the Australian bid of the probity problems they were going to face. Blatter gave a special welcome to FIFA’s Honorary President, Dr Joao Havelange, his predecessor who created the corrupt process.

Blatter was Havelange’s protege. He had served under him for decades as a FIFA technical director, then General Secretary before succeeding Havelange as President in 1998.

When Havelange stood down as FIFA’s President, there had been a contest between Blatter and Lennart Johansson. Johannson ran on a platform that an independent accountant should examine FIFA’s business practices under Havelange.

Why would a candidate for FIFA’s Presidency want an examination of the organisation’s business practices? Such a platform, too, should have alerted countries making bids for World Cup hosting rights that the process lacked probity.

Havelange resigned from his Honorary President position in 2013 in disgrace.

But there was plenty of evidence, even in 2008, that Havelange had created a FIFA that was corrupt, root and branch.

In 1993, for instance, Havelange banned Pele from the draw for the 1994 FIFA World Cup because as Brazil’s Minister for Sport, the great football star had drafted legislation limiting the power (and opportunities for corruption) of the Brazilian Football Confederation.

Manipulating the votes of the various confederations was Havelange’s method of imposing FIFA’s power and access to corruption offers during the campaigns for World Cup hosting rights.

In 1999, De Telegraaf reported that Havelange had accepted gifts (including diamonds) in connection with Amsterdam’s failed bid for the 1992 Summer Olympic Games.

And in May 2006, the British investigative journalist Andrew Jennings’ book ‘Foul! The secret world of FIFA bribes, vote-rigging and ticket scandals’ exposed details of the large scale corruption and systematic vote-rigging of World Cup bids, which had been master-minded by the authoritarian Havelange.

Brian Phillips writing for Grantland (23 August 2011) on “Corruption, Murder, and the Beautiful Game: On FIFA’s Scandalous History” alluded to the importance of Jennings’ investigations:

“Havelange reigned at FIFA for 24 years and kept the machine working through sheer grandiose force of personality…

“When he announced his retirement in 1998, the race to succeed him pitted Lennart Johannson, the Swedish President of UEFA, against Blatter, who was then FIFA’s Secretary-General. Johannson had a reputation for incorruptibility – it was thought he might open the books. Blatter was Havelange’s protege. Blatter won 111 – 80.

“When asked after the election about improprieties in the vote, Blatter, always sniffier and more preening than his mentor – openly teased the questioner: ‘The match is over, the players have already gone to the changing rooms. I will not respond to the question.’ The investigative journalist Andrew Jennings records in his book “Foul!” that Havelange’s allies in Qatar were rumoured to have paid $50,000 each to delegates who agreed to vote for Blatter…”

Again in 2006, Jennings aired the results of his intrepid investigations on the BBC Panorama program ‘The beautiful bung: Corruption and the World Cup’.

Earlier, in 2002, at Blatter’s first new conference after he was re-elected President of FIFA, Jennings got the mic and asked, “Herr Blatter, have you ever taken a bribe?”

The complacent football media at the conference sidled away from him, as if he had farted in a cathedral. Some months later a FIFA official secretly handed Jennings a huge cache of files revealing secret bonuses Blatter had been paying himself.

This cache became the founding documents for his explosive book and television documentary. Blatter threatened to sue for defamation but never got around to it.

The point about all this is that Prime Minister Rudd and Frank Lowy should have known that they were taking Australia into a vipers nest of corruption when they launched the bid for hosting rights to the Football World Cup.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane reported in June 2009 that Australia’s bid to win World Cup hosting rights was being coordinated by Prime Minister Rudd and cabinet. No cost-benefit assessment had been done, Keane asserted.

Kevin Rudd met the then FIFA vice-president Jack Warner in November 2009 during a CHOGM meeting in Trinidad. A photo of a smiling Rudd and warily-smiling Warner was taken after the meeting.

Warner warned Rudd that a World Cup bid wasn’t just about figures but about the host nation’s social commitments:

“I can tell you the technical qualities are not the decisive part. What plays a part is what members see is what is in it for them. Not personally, but for their confederation… When you can convince us about that, then of course you are the winner.”

Anyone who had the slightest information about Warner and FIFA would have known that he was speaking in code. Grease our palm, the code indicated, and we might give you our vote.

Warner later told journalists, just in case Rudd had not cracked the code, that “Australia had a good chance” of winning the bid.

Some time before the crucial FIFA vote on the hosting rights of the 2022 World Cup, FFA sent out a cheque to Warner’s CONCACAF for $462,000. Lowy is adamant that the cheque was made out to CONCACAF to turn Marvin Lee Stadium in Trinidad in a “centre of soccer excellence”.

This week the BBC said it had documents that showed that three FIFA deposits on consecutive months in 2008 amounting to $US10 million from CONCACAF ended up in Warner’s own accounts

Just to round out this sordid story, when the FIFA vote was finally made Australia got just one vote for its bid. $45 million spent to get one vote!

Andrew Webster, in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 4, had an interesting article headed: ‘FIFA corruption was obvious to FFA five years ago’.

He described how the late Rod Allen, a former sports editor at the SMH and in 2011 FFA’s public affairs manager, told a gaggle of journalists after the failed Australian bid that it was clear to him from “the moment the bid team arrived in Zurich that Australia had little chance of hosting the World Cup in 2022 or in the forseeable future.

“We never had a chance. The whole thing stank. Deals were being struck between shady characters right there, in front of each other. The seedy machinations were there for all to see. We rolled out Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Elle McPherson and some naff kangaroos talking to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. We were scalped. We had gone into the bidding process brimming with confidence. Too much confidence.”

While I was writing this the ABC News reported Frank Lowy saying that the failed bid was “my fault. I take full responsibility.” Australia had been “naive” during throughout the bidding process.

I am sorry but this makes no sense to me.

Lowy is an acclaimed (rightly so) and successful businessman with interests around the world. He is not a naive person in the way business, real business and football business, for that matter, is done.

It defies belief that he did not know that the bidding process was corrupt.

Why did FFA allocate $11 million of the $45 million (according to some accounts on the advice of Blatter himself) to a shadowy vote-whisperer like Peter Hargitay if the bidding process was not a corrupt one?

Hargitay was Blatter’s special advisor in the 2000s before he became a World Cup vote-whisperer. Hargitay’s appointment was opposed by the former two-term FFA independent director Jack Reilly.

This story should not end with Lowy’s abject mea culpas.

There needs to be a climax to what has been a disaster in goverance and good policy, in my opinion, from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and football boss Frank Lowy.

They need to detail everything about the World Cup hosting bid.

Why was it undertaken in the first place? Why wasn’t a business plan created? What were the projections offered about the success of the bid? Why wasn’t FIFA’s predilection towards corruption investigated or acknowledged? How did Hargitay actually spend his huge FFA retainer? Why did the cheque to Warner’s CONCACAF not come from FFA’s taxpayer’s money account? Why was defamation action taken against The Age when it tried to expose some of the FIFA rorts? Why hasn’t FFA made a full and detailed accounting of its bid?

In other words, we need to know why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (encouraged by Frank Lowy) gave a more than fair shake of the taxpayers’ sauce bottle to FIFA for Australia’s futile bid to win Football World Cup hosting rights.