There’s just so much to love about the Nine News report on the student protests against higher education fees from 1987 that suddenly re-emerged this week. Peter Harvey, for example, with his celebrated, impossibly low, authoritative tones coming (as they almost always did) from Canberra. His awful brown suit, matched only by the dated fashion of the student protesters he was covering. But the star turn comes undoubtedly from a young Joe Hockey, pledging to “go out onto the streets and to protest … in our campaign for free education”.

Touche. As archival footage goes, it’s a good get. But here’s the question: beyond the obvious entertainment value, why should we care about this?

The implicit charge – frequently made explicit by an array of internet warriors – is one of hypocrisy. There’s socialist Joe the student unionist who thought deregulating tertiary fees was “suicidal for student welfare”, and there’s cigar-smoking Joe the Liberal heavyweight who now presides over such homicidal policy because it doesn’t affect him.

We’re being asked to conclude that one of them is disingenuous or has sold out to the other. What we’re not being asked to conclude is that someone’s position might change over the course of 27 years. Or that the world might have changed sufficiently in that time to make someone feel a change in position is justified. In short, we’re being asked to hold Hockey to an inhuman standard that demands he adopt one position on all things throughout his life irrespective of circumstance.

On that score Labor’s Shadow Assistant Treasurer Andrew Leigh might empathise. He has spent a good chunk of this week sitting in Parliament watching the Abbott government throw his own prose back in his face.