When reviewing the economic picture of 2018, the nagging question is just how much it matters in a political sense. Clearly there is more to life than politics, and the suggestion that everything must be pitched in terms of the political impact is as awful as suggesting that somehow every issue must be related back to how it will affect house prices. But with an election in the offing – either in early March or mid May – the political implications of the economy come more to the fore.

It’s axiomatic that “management of the economy” is considered a major reason for people’s voting choices. But just what that means is rather more difficult to surmise. In the Australian National University’s long-running survey of voters’ choices after each federal election, 30% of Coalition voters listed management of the economy as the most important issue in 2016, while only 10% of ALP voters did the same.

But how do we judge management of the economy, and what did 2018 reveal?

In my 2017 recap I wrote: “This year has been all about companies and investment and the recovery in the jobs market. Next year will be all about whether or not this foundation leads to strong wages and household incomes growth.”

We now know the answer to that question. It did not lead to strong wages or household income growth. And perhaps worse, the strong recovery in the job market has lost some steam.

Yes, the unemployment rate has fallen. At the end of last year the unemployment rate was 5.5% and in the latest figures for November it was down to 5.1%. You can always argue the toss about the importance of the unemployment rate, but there’s little argument that a lower one is better, regardless of what type of employment that may entail.

There has also been a nice improvement in the numbers of people working full-time. The percentage of men aged 25-64 working full-time has risen from 73.2% at the end of last year to 73.4%. That’s the highest level since July 2013, but still a long way down from the 75.8% who were working full-time before the GFC hit.

For women, full-time work continues to be more common – in November a record 41.9% of 25-64-year-old women worked full-time.

And yet both total employment and full-time employment growth slowed in the past year. 2017 saw a boom in the growth in work, but whereas in that year employment grew by 3.4%, in the 12 months to November this year it was down to 2.4% – still above the long-term average, but certainly not quite as exciting a story for the government as it was a year ago.

Underemployment of course remains the stone in the shoe of the Australian economy, and has not improved as much as unemployment has. The overall rate of underemployment has barely fallen this year, from 8.5% to 8.4%, and the gap between it and the unemployment rate is now greater than ever before.

And all age groups now experience higher underemployment than they did when the Coalition took office in September 2013.

That has fed into continued weak wages growth. The latest private sector annual wages growth is just 2.1% – up from 1.9% in December last year, but with inflation running at 1.9%, it is barely a real wage increase and it is why households have begun reducing their level of saving in order to keep up their expenditure.

But even with a reduction in the level of savings, we see households cutting back. The latest GDP figures showed that household expenditure growth has fallen from 2.8% in December last year to 2.5% – well below the long-term average of 3.5%.

At the same time, the real average compensation per employee has fallen, even while the growth of company profits has begun to rise sharply. It means that a low level of national income is going to employees, as has been the case for nearly 55 years.

And so amid this scenario the major economic policy of the year was a tax cut designed mostly to aid those earning over $90,000.

Notionally this was to remove bracket creep of paying a higher marginal rate of tax for earnings over $90,000. But in an era of low wage growth it meant that someone on the median full-time earnings of $68,640 would be unlikely to reach that level until 2029, and someone on the median overall earnings of $55,432 wouldn’t have to worry about bracket creep until 2038.

It was a policy that according to the government’s own figures saw those on $200,000 receiving a tax cut worth more than four times that received by someone on $90,000.

We also saw a raft of company tax cuts, which supposedly would fire up investment. And yet the latest figures show that the growth of non-mining investment has slowed dramatically this year, while mining investment continues to fall.

And so we go to the election with an economy doing mostly fine, but a question that if we had a strong year in 2017 and a fine one in 2018, then where are the returns to households? If these have been the good years, what hope is there for households if things turn bad?

Do voters care about underemployment and unemployment rates, or the declining saving ratio and weakening investment growth figures?

Do they care about the $5bn surplus in 2019-20 projected in Monday’s mid-year economic and fiscal outlook – supposedly the gold standard proof that the government is good at economic management?

Probably not, but they do care about their wage rises, their disposable income and the declining ability to save.

And after such a lengthy period of all three either declining or remaining weak, the government is going to find it difficult to argue during the election campaign that people are better off now than they were five years ago – even with lower unemployment and a budget surplus.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist