As Premier Iemma welcomes George Bush and the other APEC delegates to a supermax prison formerly known as Sydney, spare a thought for John and David Langley. In 1966, the Langleys, enraged by a different president and a different war, successfully spattered Lyndon Johnson’s cavalcade with paint.

Curiously, the world did not come to an end.

The Langleys’s LBJ stunt remains one of the iconic protest moments of the late sixties and early seventies, decades that Australia somehow survived without water cannons and mobile holding cells and the phalanx of other defences now arising around APEC.

For instance, most people now regard the Vietnam Moratoriums as exemplary acts of civic engagement crucial to ending the slaughter of Vietnam. At the time, though, the Daily Telegraph warned people to avoid the Moratorium “like a plague spot” and ASIO secretly advised about the likely “destruction of the democratic parliamentary system of government and its replacement by a form of collectivism.”

Yet, even with Maoists publicly proposing to tear down the US consulate “brick by brick”, the idea that Moratorium goers should be screened off from the city by a five kilometre fence would have seemed perfectly insane.

Of course, those were the halcyon days before terrorism.

Except that they weren’t. A significant proportion of the recorded terror attacks on Australian soil took place in the sixties and seventies, with, for instance, the Ustasha, a fascistic Croatian group, bombing consulates in Sydney in 1967 and 1969, Canberra in 1969 and Melbourne in 1970.

Indeed, LBJ visited only a few months after one of the worst terrorist crimes in Melbourne’s history. In June 1966, nineteen-year-old Peter Kocan attended an anti-war rally and shot opposition leader Arthur Calwell with a sawn-off rifle, later explaining that he “didn’t like his politics”.

Now, compare Kocan’s crime to the instances of Islamototalifascism with which the media regularly terrifies us. No one has ever suggested that David Hicks actually hurt anyone. He certainly didn’t attempt an assassination of a federal politician.

But where Hicks found himself locked for five years without trial or charge in conditions that fostered clinical depression and an epidemic of suicides, Peter Kocan was sent for treatment to a psychiatric facility.

John Howard treated the Hicks family with barely veiled contempt; Calwell met with Kocan’s mother and sent his best wishes to the man who had tried to kill him. While Kocan went on to write several novels based on his experiences, David Hicks has been threatened with a gag order and “proceeds of crime” legislation.

Kocan is now an acclaimed and successful writer, fully integrated into society — and good luck to him. It’s a remarkable testament to our evolution since 11 September that the crude criminology of 1966 seems a model of tolerance and enlightenment.

Likewise with the response to protests.

In hindsight, people like the Langleys who protested against Vietnam seem infinitely more moral than the politicians who swooned before LBJ. Given Iraq and climate change and everything else, future historians will not wonder about those who protested (at APEC or elsewhere) against George Bush.

They’ll be much more puzzled by those who didn’t.