Tony Abbott has conceded – in an interview with an international journal – that Australians enjoy a “high and rising standard of living”.

This is – according to available statistical evidence – true. It’s just not the message we’ve been getting from politicians – and especially not from the Coalition for, oh, about the last four years.

In the interview with the journal World Affairs, Abbott said Australia was “an inherently conservative country”, which in his view all successful societies are. This didn’t necessarily mean Australia would always vote conservative, he said, because good Labor governments could tap into Australians’ “basic conservatism” and poor conservative governments could alienate it.

So far, so good. If you read the quotes rather than focus on the “inherently conservative” grab, he’s really just stating the obvious: that Australian politics is played in the centre, and voters tend to be cautious.

But listing the characteristics that made Australia “undeniably successful”, he nominated its “high and rising standard of living”, as well as “just and generally accepted institutions” and “a relatively happy recent history”.

Which is also fine, except when you compare it with almost all the Coalition’s messaging for the duration of Abbott’s leadership, which has constantly told us that we are suffering debilitating and escalating “cost of living pressures”, particularly because of the carbon tax.

This doorstop in Victoria in April is a typical example: “It was good to be talking to local mums and, as you'd expect, the main thing on their mind is cost of living. The Coalition does have a plan. We offer real solutions that will help the forgotten families of Australia with cost of living pressures.”

Not sure how that tallies with an understanding that Australians enjoy “high and rising standard of living”. And the carbon tax – even as currently legislated – added less than the estimated 0.7% increase to the costs of an average household anyway.

But Abbott’s statement in the journal World Affairs does tally with the facts.

According to the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (Natsem) at the end of last year, the average Australian household is more than $200 a week better off than it was in the mid-1980s and in fact, Australians’ standard of living “has never been better”.

Natsem found lower interest rates had more than compensated for recent electricity and gas price rises, even if the latter was front of mind for many households. Its findings were supported by Lonergan Research’s cost of living survey.

Natsem also assessed the impact upon this relative good fortune of the policies on offer by the major parties at the time of the May budget.

In an analysis published in the Sunday Telegraph in May, it found that after taking into account Abbott’s promise to abolish the carbon price but keep the compensation, as well as his pledge to abolish Labor’s schoolkids bonus, 87% of households would be better off under the Coalition.

But the exception was struggling families with kids, the families politicians like to refer to as “forgotten” even though they talk about them all the time.

The research found that families earning less than $100,000 with children would for the most part wind up considerably worse off under the Coalition after the abolition of the schoolkids bonus, which provides $410 a year for each child at primary school and $820 for high schoolers.

The Coalition dismissed that analysis by asserting – contrary to what Labor has been saying – that a re-elected Labor government would abolish the schoolkids bonus too.

Now all the calculations will probably have to be redone if, as expected, Labor brings forward the start of a floating carbon price.

But at least we now have an agreed starting point for the policy comparison: Australians’ standard of living has been rising.