From: Michael Lockrey Sent: Friday, 4 December 2009 1:50 AM To: disabdis Subject: Cinema Exemption under s.55 of the DDA Cinema Exemption submission I wanted to start with a brief story which I believe illustrates why we shouldn't give away our ability to make complaints against Australian cinema chains under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. My name is Michael Lockrey and I am Deaf. English is my first language and I have only acquired Auslan sign language skills in recent years. On 16 October 2009, I attended a screening of "Mao's Last Dancer" at the Greater Union cinema in George Street, Sydney. The Friday night session had been advertised as an "open - captioned" screening of the movie and it was to be my first ever experience of attending a cinema with accessible content and to be actually able to follow the movie (i.e. plot, dialogue, etc) that was being screened. This was due to the fact that I reside in a regional area of New South Wales that does not have a local cinema providing accessible content. My wife and I eagerly took our seats after double-checking again with ticket office staff that the movie was to be shown with the advertised captions. The upcoming releases came and went - without captions! [That's OK - I reassured myself - you can't expect too much! As long as the main movie has captions, she'll be right..........] But then the main movie started and nothing! After waiting until we were about 5 to 10 minutes into the movie it was obvious that the promised captions were not going to make an appearance. My wife and I then made a decision to leave the cinema and make a complaint to the front desk ticket staff, with the hope of obtaining refunds (at a minimum). Once we had made our way out, we could see that there was already another deaf individual there communicating with cinema staff. After some discussions with the various staff members, we were finally advised that it was all a "mistake" and that they would "restart" the movie with the advertised captions! We gingerly made our way back into the "packed" Friday night cinema and resumed our seats down the front. The lights were now on and it was obvious to "all and sundry" that we were the "ingrates" who had stopped everyone from enjoying their Friday night flicks! Once the movie started again, we settled back into our chairs and by the end of the evening, I had enjoyed a fantastic and fully accessible movie experience with my wife for the first time in my life! It is also one which I will readily repeat in the future (if I am given the chance!) With the benefit of hindsight and if I was a cynical man, I could easily believe that this had all been no "mistake". Instead, you could form the alternative view that the cinema staff had simply made an operational decision. i.e. that it was far more important to them that the rights of a large crowd of non- Deaf / non-hearing impaired cinema-goers took precedence over the rights of the few Deaf / hearing impaired ticket holders who had made their way to George Street on this Friday evening. This worries me as we would be placing similar decisions in the future in the hands of the cinema chains without any rights or remedies available to us under the proposed exemption. I am also concerned that there has been a lot of effort expended by certain advocacy and community organisations in supporting this application as having merit, with the main justification being that it is a great improvement in relative terms on what is available now. To me, this just illustrates again how poorly we are being treated by the cinema chains and I simply cannot support the view that by being treated slightly "less poorly" for the next 2.5 years (at least) is worth it. I can understand their arguments that by continuing to use advocacy and discrimination claims may not result in the same levels of accessibility being offered, but I view this as no great loss as we are only being provided with tokenistic accessibility in any event - both now and under the proposed exemption. In summary, I oppose the application for exemption. I place an extremely high value on my human rights. If we truly support social inclusion in Australia, then all Deaf and hearing impaired individuals must have the ability to take part in basic social and community events, such as attending the local cinema and being able to enjoy an accessible movie experience through the provision of captioned content. Anything less than this, shows continued contempt for those who are Deaf / hearing impaired and who have consistently fought for more than two decades to improve the accessibility of cinema services with so little success. I fail to see why the cinema chains should be "rewarded" with a further exemption under the Disability Discrimination Act with such an appalling track record on accessibility to date. Kind regards, Michael Lockrey Email: mlockrey@mac.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/mlockrey Mobile: 0432 548998 SKYPE: palindrome_man