A trio of Afghan staff who worked alongside Australian troops are braving blisters and the blistering cold in a 700km trek to Canberra, calling on the Albanese government to repatriate stranded families.
Local interpreters who worked with Australia during the two-decade long occupation of Afghanistan have less than six months to apply for a humanitarian visa.
The locally engaged employee program will close to applicants on November 30 before it winds up in May next year.
Qutbiallam Timor, president of the Afghan Locally Engaged Employee Alliance, is urging Anthony Albanese and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles to expand the program to include 5000 humanitarian visas for extended family members.
"We were the eyes and ears of Australia's defence forces and diplomats in the battleground in Afghanistan so it is their moral obligation towards the employees' extended families to bring them to safety and freedom," he told AAP from Benalla in regional Victoria.
More than 2500 Afghan workers and their families - from interpreters to consular staff - have been resettled in Australia in the last decade.
Mr Timor worked as a business advisor and a monitoring analyst with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at a multinational base in the Urzugan province for a year before resettling in Melbourne in 2014.
"These families who have been left behind are being harassed, tortured and even killed," he said.
Mr Timor said he knew of reprisals from the Taliban and other insurgents against relatives of staff because of their affiliation with Australia.
He cited the abduction and killing of five Afghan workers by the Taliban in 2015.
They'd been employed under an Australian aid project.
The group is calling for applications of extended families of employees to be given priority, the reconsideration of refused visa requests and the acceptance of applicants who have been displaced outside of Afghanistan.
"The program must not end," Mr Timor said, adding he had not heard back from the the prime minister or immigration minister about meeting his group.
"Shutting down the scheme would jeopardise Australia's international standing."
An independent review of the program by former public servant Vivienne Thom said the defence and foreign affairs departments were ill equipped to assess applications in a timely way.
More than 12,000 permanent humanitarian visas have been granted to Afghan citizens under the program since the fall of Kabul in August 2021.
With around 500 km to go, the three men are due to reach Canberra by August 7, when both houses of parliament are sitting.
