This week came the news that the economy over the past year grew faster than it has any time since 2012. It was a nice point given that the average household’s income is still at 2012 levels in real terms. The national accounts are not reflecting the reality of people’s own economic experience, but they do reflect how skewed the economy has become away from households.

Within the national account the ABS provided a figure called “real net national disposable income per capita”, which is often referred to as a measure of Australia’s economic wellbeing. In the past it has been a rough and ready guide for how we’re all going. But the problem is the national income includes not just the income of households, but also companies.

In the past two years, this measure of wellbeing was 5.5%. Given the average annual rise this century has been just 1.7%, that should mean we’re all doing rather nicely!

Except over the past two years, the real household disposable income has fallen. If you use the ABS’s price index for household consumption it has fallen 1.3%, if you use the standard consumer price index, it has fallen 2.5%. By either measure, household’s disposable income is now lower than it was at the end of 2011.

Six and half years of no improvement.

And yet the mining industry is booming once again – it contributed nearly 11% to our entire GDP growth of the past year. But it only accounted for 4% of the increase in employment – below the 7% employment growth share it took in the pre-GFC mining boom years. And whereas back then wage growth in the industry reached 6%, now mining wages are growing by just 1.3% – lower than the overall rate.

So yes, we still have a mining boom, but one where the benefits mostly go to the companies and not the workers, and which unlike in the past now has a negligible flow on to other industries.

We are living in an economy that is quickly shifting away from households and workers and towards companies. An economy where workers have little option but to acquiesce.

This week the ABS also released the latest industrial dispute numbers. In the past 12 months just 41,000 employees were at some point engaged in industrial action – it marked only the second time ever that fewer than 50,000 were so engaged. The only other time that has occurred was in the 12 months of 2007 when under WorkChoices the number of employees on strike was down to a record low 36,000.

So much for the Fair Work Act putting the balance too greatly in favour of unions.

And then came the cheery news that interest rates were going up.

When Westpac announced that they were raising the mortgage rate by 14 basis points, everyone knew that the other three big banks would follow. And so when this week both the Commonwealth and ANZ banks announced that they too were raising their home loan rates by 15 and 16 basis points respectively, there was little shock. Around 92% of all home mortgage lending occurs through banks, and the big 4 account for 80% of that. Thus the entire process was nicely summed up by one analyst who told the ABC that NAB will likely follow soon, “I think it’s pretty certain now NAB will have to go as well — probably not have to so much as they can go now.”

That really is the whole issue – the big four banks can, and so they do. Much like employers, in a world where going on strike has been made effectively impossible, can and do what they like with wage negotiations.

Of course the oddity of the rate increase is that this week marked the 26th month the Reserve Bank has had the cash rate set at 1.5%. The banks argue that they need to increase the rates because the cost of their funding has increased.

And it is true that recently the short-term funding costs have gone up quite markedly. The cost of short-term funding has definitely risen in the period since August 2016 when the RBA put the cash rate at its current level.

But short-term financing accounts for only around 20% of banks funding costs. Meanwhile, the cost of deposits – which makes up 60% of banks funding costs – has fallen.

Since August 2016 the gap between the interest rate banks pay for short-term funds and the cash rate has increased 23 basis points (or 0.23% pts) – so yes, it has become more costly. But in the same period the gap between the interest rate it pays for term deposits and the cash rate has fallen 43 basis points – so that has actually become cheaper.

Swing and roundabouts, I guess – where the customers get thrown off the roundabout and hit in the back of the head with the swing.

It’s not true that the banks are doing this because the government is dishevelled; the reality is for all Peter Costello’s old lines about having the banks in for a stern talking to, they can do what they like for the most part.

So disconnected from the reality of households has our economy become that the president of the Real Estate Institute on the ABC’s 730 report could suggest with a straight face that people struggling to pay rent should “God forbid, get two jobs”. He suggested “Now your viewers will hate that. But many, many people do it. A lot of our migrants work a couple of jobs”.

Of course they do! Because one great reason employers love migrant workers is that they can use threats about their visa to prevent them from joining a union, and their temporary residency status often sees them exploited. Fairfax media found that some workers here under the seasonal worker programme were paid as little as $8 an hour, and a survey by UTS and UNSW Sydney found that in 2017 a third of international students were being paid only about half the median wage.

The economy has long been set more favourably towards those with power, but the past few years has seen a massive lurch, and this week gave us all a very stark reminder.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist