This year my family has decided to avoid the usual online petitions and donations of gold coins that disappear into the purses of NGOs. Instead, we will write a letter to immigration minister Scott Morrison to protest our government's appalling treatment of refugees. I hope that you will join us at a time when compassion and empathy are celebrated; if you're not convinced, let me first give you a rundown of the allegations which have been reported by journalists in recent months.

The Australian government locks asylum seekers up in appalling conditions and treats them with less respect than many of us treat the family dog. At least the family dog usually has a name. Refugees in Australia’s detention centers today are identified and referred to by a number. These people committed no crime in seeking asylum in Australia and the vast majority are fleeing from war, torture and death threats.

When these people arrive at Australian detention centres, they are left with severe sunburn and skin rashes, sitting in clothing drenched with faeces and urine while they await interrogation. Their shoes, glasses and hearing aids are taken away. Any medication they are carrying when they arrive is also confiscated – and often it is months before it is replaced.

Refugees at offshore detention centres sleep in cots on dirt floor, in 50 degree heat, with limited numbers of fans. Drinking water in some camps is being rationed to dangerously low levels – only 500ml per day. The US Centre for Disease Control states that it is possible to get typhoid in Nauru’s water. The detainees are constantly at risk of malaria – yet doctors recommend that children younger than five and pregnant women not take anti-malaria medicine, which is unsuitable for them.

Amnesty found that detainees on Manus Island “have fainted from heat stroke because they are forced to queue for hours in the sun for food.” When the Manus camp flooded, detainees found snakes in their rooms. The toilets are routinely broken or lacking in number, and the conditions in one dormitory were so bad that Amnesty International "considers the accommodation of asylum seekers there a violation of the prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment.”

Women are at risk of miscarriage, their health further jeopardised from stress and lack of pre-natal care. One woman who miscarried on Christmas Island was “told to lower her expectations” when she asked for an ultrasound. Another pregnant woman was refused an ultrasound despite concerns of foetal abnormalities and was not provided timely access to a termination; she has now "passed the point where a termination is likely.”

New mothers in detention centres suffer with post-natal depression. Children play in the dust; they have no toys. The indefinite incarceration is a breeding ground for mental health issues. People slash their wrists, slam their heads into walls in distress, self-harm out of desperation. People attempt to commit suicide. Children attempt to commit suicide. There isn’t a dedicated paediatric mental health service available.

Orphaned and unaccompanied children who have survived the horrific experience of traveling alone to Australia to seek asylum – or who have lost parents on the way to Australia – languish in terrible conditions, treated "worse than animals".

Queer detainees are potentially being sent to PNG, where homosexuality is illegal – they live in fear of the horrific scenario of being sent to prison for their sexuality.

Blood pathology reports aren’t returned in a timely manner, which in particular incident left an entire camp exposed to a case of tuberculosis for 44 days. As Guardian journalists David Marr and Oliver Laughland’s investigations have shown, desperately ill refugees are made to beg for medical treatment and have to wait months to be flown to mainland Australia for life-saving medical interventions.

Disabled people are left without a life-line to specialist medical care: doctors have asked for a young woman with cerebral palsy to be removed from a camp and sent to the Australian mainland. A baby with a defective heart-pacer had to wait months to be moved to Perth for specialist care. Rather than respond to the concerns of health workers, the government sacked the Immigration Health Advisory Group.

Meanwhile, on Manus Island, the security firm GS4 is investigating claims that off duty staff have been harassing women and school girls. Rapes occur and victims continue to live in accommodation alongside their abusers. These rapes (some allegedly involving underaged individuals) are not thoroughly reported on, as the department of immigration is not keeping formal records. The perpetrators are not charged.

Predictably, there are riots.

Morrison is the legal guardian of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, but he has shirked his responsibility by placing them in offshore camps. The Australian Medical Association has suggested Morrison is responsible for child abuse.

And yet, Morrison turns up to staged press conferences once a week and refuses to comment on medical reports alleging inhumane conditions. When journalists ask questions, not only are the questions not answered, but the transcripts then fail to record journalists’ questions correctly.

Asylum seekers indefinitely detained in Australian detention centres live with the knowledge that they may be deported to countries where they will be potentially tortured and killed. Australia does not offered them any legal representation.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates the cost of mandatory detention to be approximately $339 per asylum seeker per day. By contrast, the cost of community processing was estimated at between $7 and $39 per asylum seeker a day, based on the current Asylum Seeker Assistance scheme fortnightly payment. We are paying for the abuse of refugees with our taxes. It would be cheaper and more humane to allow asylum seekers to live in the community amongst us.

Our government locks up refugees because it thinks it will win votes. Our government creates an economy for contractors and communities complicit in torture, abuse, child neglect and illegal detention on Nauru, Christmas Island, and Manus Island. A profitable, outsourced industry with no other purpose than to create human misery, violating international prohibitions against torture. All of this is done in our names.

Silence is complicity to this government’s decision to allow this to happen. Rational cost-benefit analysis clearly shows it is not in Australia’s benefit to treat asylum seekers like animals.

This is why I will be writing to Morrison.

Don’t send an email that can be ignored with the help of the minister’s spam filter. Send a letter, which his office is required to read. Ask the government to immediately end off-shore, indefinite detention of all asylum seekers. Request that asylum seekers are provided with adequate access to legal representation, and that applications for refugee status are processed in a timely manner.

As your family celebrates the holidays this year, ask that asylum seekers are treated not only in accordance with international law, but also granted human rights, as moral imperative requires.

Find the postal address for Morrison's parliament office here.