u/Appropriate_Volume

This seems to be the crux of the issue:

The same Liberal source points to the Liberal Party’s internal review of the 2025 campaign, conducted by former Howard government minister Nick Minchin and former NSW state minister Pru Goward, which essentially admitted that party officials felt they had no choice but to rely on Brethren volunteers. “The ageing of Party members has added to the problem of providing sufficient numbers of booth workers over the years, and some campaigns were grateful for the assistance of volunteers who were also members of the Plymouth Brethren,” Minchin and Goward wrote.

Something the review doesn't appear to have grappled with from these excerpts was that any use of the Brethren is likely to be counter-productive given they are well known to be nutters in the areas of Australia where they are most active. Having them as the face of the party at polling booths in these areas was a really bad idea - it is likely that the Liberals would have been better off with no-one handing out how to votes.

I'd note that this didn't happen in every Western country African American troops were sent to. The Australian Government was very uncomfortable with black American soldiers, and tried to prevent any from being deployed here. When the US insisted on this (as they were an essential part of its military), African American soldiers faced a range of restrictions and were largely sent to areas distant from Australia's main cities.

The background here was that the White Australia policy was in force at the time, which involved a near-total ban on immigration by non-Whites, and Indigenous Australians faced appalling levels of discrimination and government controls.

Historians usually note that the insurgents in Rhodesia were motivated mainly by wanting to rid the country of the white minority regime, and didn't have a deep commitment to socialism - adopting this was largely done to win support from the Eastern Bloc after they failed to gain support from the west.

As u/Remember2005 has noted, the circumstances in which Rhodesia declared independence made the country a diplomatic pariah throughout its existence. No country in the world, not even South Africa, ever formally recognised it as being independent as there was consensus that this was illegal.

A more prosaic reason why other countries didn't support Rhodesia was that it was regarded as unsustainable, as the white minority government could only draw on support from the 5% or so of the population that was white. The South African government appears to have concluded that Rhodesia was doomed from the mid-1970s, but continued to try to prop it up until near the end. Other governments reached that conclusion much earlier - the British expected that Rhodesia would quickly fail after independence, for example. The state only survived for 15 years, and was nominally a multi-ethnic state for the last 2 or so years.

The Rhodesian Government's erratic policies and the low quality of many of its prominent figures (including Prime Minister Ian Smith) also didn't help things, as the government was seen as being unrealistic and difficult to do any kind of business with. The naked racism was also obviously quite off-putting.

There's a long history of the Iranian government attacking various other countries. Remember that it's run by religious nutjobs.

This seems nuts. ON isn't preferencing the Liberals and Cory Bernardi is busy reminding everyone what a fringe dweller he is, so what's in it for the Liberals to direct preferences towards ON?