Whats Going on in Admin CP
 

I'm wantign to display the information from the whats going on section on the forum to the front page of the admincp,

I've tried to copy the code as a plug in but thats not worked, I've tried copying the code to a new template and used a plug in with:
global $template_hook;
$newTemplate = vB_Template::create('stats');
$template_hook['admin_index_main3'] .= $newTemplate->render();

That didn't work.

Can anyone suggest how I should go about doing this.

I'm pretty sure there was a mod that did this already (for 3.x, I think), so you may want to check that out. We really can't comment since you've said nothing about the hook location you chose for your plugin, nor have you posted your code that would get the stats - just rendering a template will get you nothing if there is nothing in the template.

the hook location was process_templates_complete and the actual template was just a copy and paste from the forumhome template from the whats going on section.

That's not going to work. You need to have some code to actually create the data to go into the template. And, admin_index_main3 is not a template_hook, it's a hook location for plugins.