Critics of the federal government say it has achieved little in six years, but it has achieved much. Yet in the 2013 election campaign it is not talking about this central, defining achievement - the extension, expansion and reinvigoration of union power - even though a large section of the electorate, the unions and the public service, supports this shift in the balance of economic power and will vote for Labor or the Greens.

The silence about this achievement is part of a much larger pattern. The government is not running on its record. The Prime Minister is not focused on his achievements. He is running a campaign built on fabrications and future glory. He has been caught lying, without compunction, on multiple occasions. This is not even the most insidious mischief.

Illustration: Simon Bosch

The government has manipulated the official statistics. It has compromised the reputation of the Treasury. An example of the endless spin cycle is the manipulation of the unemployment rate, a basic measure of the economy and thus, indirectly, a measure of the government's performance. The official rate is 5.7 per cent. It has been trending up for a year, from 5.2 per cent, a 10 per cent rise in 12 months. The real unemployment rate is higher, about 6.2 per cent according to a study by Andrew Baker of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Baker found that more than 100,000 job-seekers had been moved out of the unemployment ranks by shifting them into training schemes. ''An astonishing 360,000 unemployed people are classified as non-job-seekers,'' Baker wrote in his centre's monograph. ''The number [in training schemes has] skyrocketed from 62,500 in 2009 to 150,000 in 2012 … People on welfare who are not required to look for work will stay on welfare longer.'' He estimates that if the unemployed who are classified as ''non-job-seekers'' was included in the unemployment baseline number, the rate would be 6.2 per cent.