[Verse 1]
Canberra's ledger needed air to breathe,
Two thousand fourteen, a scheme up its sleeve—
Sell the wires, sell the pipelines, sell the road that groans,
Recycle the asset, don't just sell the bones.
Fifteen cents on every dollar, a federal thank-you note,
Lease it, build again, and that's the quid pro quo.
[Chorus]
Recycle, recycle, turn the grid to gold,
Fifteen percent bonus for the deals we've sold,
Transgrid, Ausgrid, Darwin's harbor too,
Lease it once, build it twice, that's the thing to do.
Recycle, recycle, Athens hears the call,
Fifty billion promised, Piraeus takes the fall.
[Verse 2]
NSW counted wires worth ten point three,
Transgrid's towers marching down toward the sea,
Ausgrid went for sixteen billion, nearly to Beijing,
Till Canberra said "not that buyer," and cut the string.
Darwin's deepwater port, five-oh-six to Landbridge hands,
A ninety-nine-year lease signed on strategic sands.
[Chorus]
Recycle, recycle, turn the grid to gold,
Fifteen percent bonus for the deals we've sold,
Transgrid, Ausgrid, Darwin's harbor too,
Lease it once, build it twice, that's the thing to do.
[Verse 3]
Athens had no Canberra bonus, just a Troika's stare,
HRADF was built to sell off what was still there,
Fifty billion was the target, barely a third arrived,
Twenty-fifteen folded it into a "Superfund" to survive.
COSCO docked at Piraeus, two-eighty-point-five the price,
Fraport took fourteen airports — regional skies sliced thin and nice.
[Verse 4]
Twenty-twelve, the PSI cut deep and clean,
Fifty-three point five percent of bonds just ceased to mean
What they meant before — two hundred billion turned to haze,
Private holders took the hit, the public found other ways.
[Verse 5]
Economists argued over who the plan truly served,
Rent extracted twice while public patience wore and curved,
Workers watched the ownership change hands but not the toll,
Tariffs climbed in silence, dividends found a new patrol.
Canberra called it efficiency, a modern master stroke,
Athens called it survival, the only hand it could evoke,
But the ledger never asks who rides the midnight bus,
Or who pays the harbor fee that funds the surplus.
[Bridge]
Back in eighteen eighty-one, the Ottomans signed their customs gone,
Eighteen ninety-eight, Athens too, bowed to the selfsame song,
History doesn't repeat, they claim, it just resends the debt collector,
Conditionality in modern clothes, still the same old spectre.
[Chorus]
Recycle, recycle, turn the grid to gold,
Fifteen percent bonus for the deals we've sold,
Transgrid, Ausgrid, Darwin's harbor too,
Piraeus, airports, Superfund too—
Lease it once, build it twice, that's the thing to do.
[Chorus]
Recycle, recycle, turn the grid to gold,
Fifteen percent bonus for the deals we've sold,
Transgrid, Ausgrid, Darwin's harbor too,
Lease it once, build it twice, that's the thing to do.
[Outro]
Sell the port, sell the grid, sell the sky above the bay,
Recycle the asset — someone else's debt to pay.