Fast forward to now and politicians across the globe have long understood that Goebbels was essentially right.

So politicians everywhere now often rely upon ‘spin doctors’, whose task is to help politicians convince electors that certain ideas or propositions are "true" or "untrue" depending upon what they want people to believe.

Thus politicians will repeat a ‘message’ - a slogan or accusation or proposition - ad nauseum because they know that eventually it will stick in the minds of their target audience.,

There is an adage in advertising that it is not until the target audience is absolutely sick to death of hearing a message that you can be sure it is finally getting through.

This brings me to Peter O'Neill and his collaborators who wish Papua New Guineans to believe that they are living in the best of all possible worlds, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary.

These politicians and their advisers are using the tried and true formula of relentlessly repeating a message, in this case that "the economy is growing strongly and that is obvious to anyone who wants to be honest".

This statement contains two keys ideas: firstly, that “the facts” support the government's position and, secondly, that "honest people” would know this is true.

Of course, the so-called facts which supposedly support the government's position are either not facts at all or they are “half-truths”, partially correct but overall misleading.

As for the issue of honesty, there appear to be no objective sources of data or commentary upon which Papua New Guineans can rely in order to understand how the country's economy is actually performing.

This enables the government to label doubt or scepticism about its statements as dishonesty or political opportunism or an example of "talking down the economy".

Papua New Guineans are not the only people on the receiving end of this sort of Orwellian manipulation of language and ideas.

It is a stock tool of trade in politics, advertising, business and even education.

Consequently, to use a mining analogy, anyone wishing to understand the world around them has to mine and process a lot of ore to find a few nuggets of truth.

However, as a general rule, whatever your government is telling you is highly unlikely to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

We live in an age when a government’s statements about anything contentious or sensitive are more likely to be carefully nuanced interpretations of selected facts, which often fall just short of outright lying. Evasiveness, diversions, ‘plausible deniability’ and waffle are depressingly common as well.

The independent media, or what’s left of it, may or may not be better depending upon their own political biases.

So, the old Roman adage of "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) can be usefully applied to anything politicians say, especially if they have a vested interest in suppressing inconvenient truths.

A true cynic might say that the safest assumption for a citizen to make is that the government is lying until proved otherwise.