It is almost a year since Sydney Harbour’s $250 million headland reserve opened to the public, but if the 27-page rule book governing what can and can’t be done at the park is anything to go by, visitors haven’t had much fun there.

Critics of the stringent rules say it is just more evidence of Sydney’s “nanny state”, while nearby residents fear the reserve is being taken away from “ordinary people”. Last month, three-year-old Nicholas Atkinson was told to stop flying his kite at the “near-deserted” stargazer lawn he was sharing with “six other people at most”.  

“I thought (the guard) was joking. There was plenty of room and we weren’t inflicting ourselves on other people,” his dad Brendan said.

Stephen Blanks, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, said the rules went too far and were not in the public interest. “I think it’s a nanny state and it’s also completely inappropriate for a public space to be so closely regulated, particularly when the space is being impinged upon by private development,” he said.

“If you can’t fly a kite in a park, where can you?”

Article: Long list of rules ruins fun at Barangaroo

Source: The Daily Telegraph