Australia’s offshore processing and mandatory detention scheme has cost close to $10 billion since 2013.

A new report by aid organisations Save the Children and Unicef estimates the Government will be in for another $6 billion at least to continue the program over the next five years.

There are about 3,000 people across Australia’s two offshore processing facilities, Nauru and Manus Island.

The future of some is up in the air after the PNG Government ordered the Manus Island centre to close.

The aid agencies’ report uses data from the Australian Government and aid organisations, including the Australian Human Rights Commission's Forgotten Children Report (2014), the Philip Moss Review and this year's joint Human Rights Watch/Amnesty International Report.

Save the Children CEO Paul Ronalds has told reporters that not only do our border policies harm innocent people, they have an economic toll too.

“Australians have had little knowledge about what's been done either in their name or with taxpayer dollars of this enormous magnitude,” he said.

“It costs about $400,000 to keep a person on either Manus or Nauru, that's per annum,” he said.

Mr Ronalds proposed spending that money on humanitarian aid in Jordan, Lebanon or Indonesia, where asylum seekers could live safely.

“Give them a quality of education, a quality of health that would take away any incentive to take on these dangerous journeys over land and through seas. That's a much better way to spend the money.

“With that sort of money, $9.6 billion, Australia can afford to invest in those places around the world which are source countries for large numbers of refugees.”

Or, he said, increase our own efforts under a less wasteful program.

“Australia should increase its humanitarian intake up to at least 30,000 people per annum. It is less per capita that we were doing in the 1970s,” Mr Ronalds said.

“Given the unprecedented nature of the global migration crisis that we face, it is just the sort of thing that Australia should do to be pulling its own weight.”

Many consider the recent string of federal governments to have shown no imagination on asylum seeker policies, and that people are being hurt as a result of their political spinelessness.

Mr Ronalds says Australians are being sold a lie.

“We've been told that you have to be in favour of people dying at sea or you have to be in favour of the current set of policies,” he said.

“What this report clearly shows is that is not true.

“A couple of weeks ago, Save the Children released polling in Malcolm Turnbull's own electorate that said the vast majority of people in his electorate wanted the Government to resolve the status of people living in Manus and on Nauru.

“We are seeing real momentum for change. It is not fair and it's not right, it's a blemish on Australia's character to have people languishing offshore.”