In the aftermath of the Trump election victory, politicians of all stripes would be well advised not to rely on quoting economic growth figures as a way of reassuring voters. Right now GDP growth and even the unemployment rate don’t agree with the real-world experience for many people.

If you want to see an example of politicians divorced from economic reality, you could do worse than Malcolm Turnbull last week.

The prime minister was asked by 3AW’s Neil Mitchell whether he related to Australia voters, to which the prime minister responded by arguing he did because it was his job and “what Australians want to see from their government is strong leadership, in particular strong economic growth”.

When asked if that message was getting through, Turnbull replied: “Well Neil we have to look at the facts. We have 3.3% real GDP growth.”

If you eyes are not rolling by now, they should be.

Another great example was given by the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop.

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When asked by ABC’s Virginia Trioli about the policy lessons for Australia from Trump’s victory, Bishop talked of the impact of the GFC in the United States and then noted, “of course, Australia didn’t go through a recession, Australia has had 25 consecutive years of economic growth”.

Ahh, 25 years of economic growth, get me some laurels, and let me rest.

There is a bit of an obsession among Australian politicians to talk about economic growth and harp on about us not having had a recession in 25 years as though that is somehow a bulwark against extremism.

Of course, the 25 years of consecutive growth line only works if we include the impact of population growth, because in per capita terms, growth fell in 2008-09:

In the December quarter of 2008, GDP per capita fell 1.2% and it took till September 2010 to get back to the level it had been in September 2008:

That’s two years where Australia’s economic output per head of population was lower than it had previously been.

That sounds like a recession to me.

It was also a period where annual household consumption growth fell two quarters in a row – the first time that had happened since 1961, and soon after domestic demand also went backwards:

In the 12 months to June 2009, the unemployment rate also rose by 1.6% points – as fast as that which occurred in the 1982-83 recession.

Now this is not to suggest that the stimulus measures done during the GFC failed. As I have written previously, it’s pretty clear the mixture of both the stimulus and exports got us through the GFC relatively unscathed compared with the rest of the world, but scathed we still were.

And were we more realistic about having experienced a recession during the GFC, we might be a bit more ready to admit that our economy is fragile – and our political system more open to intrusion by extremists seeking to portray those in charge as out of touch.

Certainly the recession of 2008-09 was much shallower than that of the early 1980s or 1990s, but, importantly for us now, it is having an extremely long tail.

One way to look at this is the decline in the average hours worked by adults since the GFC compared with after the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s.

The drop-off in average hours worked in the first 12 months of the GFC was actually faster than during the 1980s and 1990s recessions. But after the stimulus measures kicked in, hours worked increase before falling again at the start of 2011:

Adults on average work nearly five-and-a-half fewer hours a month than they did back in June 2008 – a worse drop-off than was experienced in the same period after the 1990s recession hit.

The drop in employment and hours worked since the GFC has also been quite disparate – not so bad in New South Wales and Victoria, but horrible elsewhere:

Just the type of disparity that is ripe for regionally focused, anti-“Canberra” political parties, especially if the government continues to talk about GDP growth as though it means something to people.

In June, as the prime minister noted, our GDP grew by 3.3%. In the past 30 years there have been two other quarters where the economy grew by that exact amount – September 1995 and September 2005 – but the impact of that growth on people’s employment is markedly different now.

In both 1995 and 2005, when the economy was growing as fast as it is now, full-time employment grew by 3%; in the 12 months to June it grew by just 0.6%:

Turnbull was right when he told Neil Mitchell that GDP growth is important because “when the economy is growing, that means more firms are hiring than firing”, but right now that link is not evident.

And it feeds into the reason why people might think the government is not wholly attuned with their economic concerns, especially when you look at how disconnected even the measure of the unemployment rate has become.

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In the past 12 months the unemployment rate has fallen by 0.4% points. Over the past 35 years such a drop would be associated with strong annual employment growth and also strong full-time employment – of around 2.5% on average. But not now.

Since 1979, when the unemployment rate had fallen by at least 0.4% points in a year, male full-time employment has never also fallen in that same period – until this year:

We are in a world where the big economic numbers mean less to real people than they ever did.

In 2005 when GDP grew 3.3%, wages grew 4.2% – double the 2.1% annual growth in June this year, despite the same economic growth.

Are we really to believe that talking up GDP growth is a winning argument? Are we to believe people will care that the unemployment rate is below 6% when full-time jobs are actually falling?

Economic data is very useful for alerting us to what is going on in the economy, but right now the big numbers are mostly good for making politicians who reflexively repeat them seem like they haven’t a clue what life is like for most Australians.