A Sydney high school principal has been awarded the Human Rights Medal for her work supporting asylum seeker and refugee children.
Dorothy Hoddinott was awarded the Australian human rights commission’s highest honour at a ceremony in Sydney on Wednesday evening.
Commissioner Gillian Triggs said Hoddinott had showed respect for the dignity and needs of people who had been “mistreated” by successive governments.
Hoddinott has been principal of Holroyd high school for almost 20 years and in that time has seen waves of students come through its intensive English centre after fleeing the world’s catastrophes.
“Imagine any conflicted area in the world and that’s where people have come from,” Hoddinott told Guardian Australia before learning she had won.
She said the number of students who finished the program and enrolled in the general high school had increased in recent years. She said it had produced increasingly good results since she threw out the rule book in 1996 and ran it on a basic set of principles of respect, understanding and responsibility.
In 2002 she established the Friends of Zainab trust fund to help disadvantaged children with their secondary and tertiary education, and in 2008 was appointed as an officer of the order of Australia for her commitment to social justice.
“The idea is we will make young people successful no matter what their background,” she said. Increasingly harsh government policies towards asylum seekers in Australia had had an impact, she added.
“The actual educational situation isn’t more difficult. What’s more difficult is what will happen to them in the future.”
Last year Hoddinott herself made a complaint to the commission when she saw that students who were on community detention were being taken out of school when they turned 18.
“It is of no benefit to anyone to take 18 year olds out of school because they have sought asylum in this country, because it is a legal act,” she said.
“If you’ve got young people who turn 18 – and just about everybody does in year 12 – and they’re not allowed to go to school, do any further study, or go to work, then you have a recipe for declining mental health.
“I can’t think of anything worse than unoccupied teenagers.”
Hoddinott said the recognition of her work at the school was testament to the work of public schools in looking after disadvantaged children.
“People are very proud of the work they do to make sure kids have a go in life and there’s not enough recognition of that,” she said.
Triggs, said while many school principals work with their local community, Hoddinott had been a “shining star.”
“She has worked indefatigably to ensure that asylum seeker children and children found to be refugees are given all the support they possibly can, to catch up on missed schooling, to rebuild their confidence, and Dorothy has been doing this as pretty much a lifetime goal,” Triggs told Guardian Australia.
“She has extraordinary vision, extraordinary humanity, and turned around a school that was not originally performing well but now she’s made it one of the leading state schools.”
Triggs said the Australian public should take note of Hoddinott’s open spirit, and “determination to respect the dignity and the need of those who have been – in my view – so mistreated by the government”.
“The government has used really inappropriate language to demean and vilify asylum seekers, describing them as queue jumpers, economic migrants, and people who really don’t deserve their rights under the refugee convention to make their case for being refugees.
“[Hoddinott] has been a leader in the community in saying that language is inappropriate and we really have to have a humane approach to every child who comes to her school. She’s done everything she can, with the support of board, teachers and school students.”
Triggs – who has had several public run-ins with the government over its asylum seeker policy – was not concerned that the awarding of the medal to Hoddinott may be seen as a political move.
“Every government rejects our work on the basis of bias,” she said, citing reports into children in detention and the stolen generation.
“We take it as a mark of objectivity because we get the same response from a Labor government as we do from the Coalition.
“It’s a big human rights issue for Australia and Dorothy is really a leader in showing that there’s another way of approaching asylum seeker issues that’s much more humane.”
The federal attorney general, George Brandis, used the awards ceremony at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to announce that all children in immigration detention – currently numbering more than 700 – would be released “by the early months of next year”.
The attorney general said 2014 was “the year of releasing children from detention”.
“It is a shameful fact that when the government was elected we found that there were 1,992 asylum seeker children in detention,” he said.
“All the children in detention will have been released by the early months of next year and we will be back to where we are in November 2007, when the number of children in detention was zero.”
The announcement was met with only a smattering of applause, and Brandis acknowledged that many in the room were at odds with his government’s approach towards asylum seekers.
“That’s fine because we are a government that celebrates a diversity of voices,” he said.
Brandis said the government would recommend to the Human Rights Commission that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders social justice commissioner, Mick Gooda, be reappointed for a second five-year term.
He said Gooda would play a crucial role in building support for a referendum on Indigenous recognition in the constitution, which would be held in “a little over two years’ time”.
The government would also hold “a major inquiry into employment discrimination against older Australians and Australians with a disability,” Brandis said.
The discrimination commissioner, Susan Ryan, paid tribute to the “strong, beautiful, proud” disability activist Stella Young, who passed away suddenly on Saturday evening at the age of 32.
“Just being the person she was, she changed our lives for the better,” Ryan said. “We have lost a great Australian.”
