The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul Sheehan lets fly at Kevin Rudd: 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. 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... The official rate is 5.7 per cent. It has been trending up for a year... . The real unemployment rate is higher, about 6.2 per cent according to a study by Andrew Baker of the Centre for Independent Studies.... There are unsubtle lies, also funded by taxpayers. The government has spent $30 million in the run-up to the election on a saturation ad campaign stating that boat people who destroy their documents will never be settled permanently in Australia. It is a fantasy. Since Rudd announced that boat people will be sent to Papua New Guinea and never see Australia, his ploy has collapsed... Then there are the outright lies by Rudd, which he keeps repeating even after they have been discredited: the Coalition does not have a secret plan to increase the GST. Tony Abbott did not strip $1 billion out of the hospital system. The opposition does not have a $70 billion deficit in its costings. The Liberals did not do a secret deal with News Corporation over the national broadband network... Millionaires will not be the primary beneficiaries of Tony Abbott's paid parental leave scheme. The price of Vegemite is not going up 50Â¢ a jar. As I said, this is in the Sydney Morning Herald, not the Murdoch media. We would never have illustrated Sheehan's column with a digitally-altered image that made Rudd seem so evil. Thanks to readers Keith, miney and John Galt.