Helen Pitt

They had people dressed as Luna Park costume people.

They really captured the imagination of Sydney.

And people just wanted...

to say, hands off our childhood.

This is a really important place.

So it is really quite remarkable that this protest movement was listened to.

And so the first time it reopened in 1982 as the Harbourside Amusement Parlour, and that was from 82 to 88.

Then it closed again.

And so they had to sort of dust off the mothballs and come out again and fight to save Luna Park.

And the remarkable thing about that was that was the time when it was going to be turned into an adult amusement park with the high rise again.

And then the government gave the operators a deadline in 1990 and said, if you're not going to keep it as an amusement park, you cannot have the lease.

Well, they defaulted on the lease.

And this amazing thing came out of that is

in the Lunar Park Site Act of 1990.

It's extraordinary.

It is one of only two amusement parks in the world that must remain an amusement park.

So it was set in legislation thereafter that if you're going to take this lease, you have to do what the people of Sydney want to do with it, and that is for it to remain an amusement park.

Well, we know in New South Wales and Australia, we call that sort of protesting NIMBYism, not in my backyard.

In this case, the residents of Milsons Point, it was NUMBYism, not under my balcony, in that this new set of owners in the 90s, we forget that the park was pretty much closed for only 13 months of the 90s.

So when it was being reopened in 1995...