There is no budget crisis when it comes to cruelty; the government is spending billions on concentration camps.

The total annual cost of mandatory detention is now $3.4 billion, according to Commission of Audit estimates. The cost is forecast to exceed $10 billion over the course of the current government.

For offshore detention, the price is $400,000 per person per year.

The government gives millions in handouts to private contractors to outsource the mistreatment of refugees.

In March, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection paid logistics company Toll Holdings $3.5 million for a tent kitchen at the Manus Island detention centre. The department claimed that buying the tent was cheaper than continuing to rent it from the company, as it has done since Manus was reopened in 2012.

For that price, you would think the kitchen would be listed in the Michelin Guide. However, one Australian security guard more accurately described the conditions in the centre as “hell on earth”.

Amnesty International released a report in December describing conditions on the island as a violation of the UN prohibition against torture. Drinking water in the largest compound is limited to less than half a litre per person per day.

Amnesty researcher Graeme McGregor, who visited Manus Island, said, “The men spend several hours a day – some reported four to five hours a day – queuing for meals and for the toilets and things like that.” Amnesty also found that toilets lack even the most basic facilities, such as soap.

The government will pay Transfield, which wrested the Manus contract from G4S earlier this year, $1.22 billion to run the Manus and Nauru camps for 20 months. Shares in Transfield soared 20.8 per cent on the news.

Transfield was, until October, chaired by Commission of Audit chief Tony Shepherd, who says the rest of us have it too good.

Transfield already held the contract to run the detention centre on Nauru, a centre which the UN High Commissioner for Refugees singled out as rat-infested, cramped and very hot.

Even if the conditions were better, a cage is a cage. These private concentration camp operators make a killing torturing refugees – approximately $900 a day per person.