As we come to the end of 2019 and prepare for the 2020s it is quite stunning how greatly our economy has changed over the past decade. Over the last 10 years “the new normal” has become a key phrase – and that normal is much worse than it used to be.

For Australia the 2010s saw us come out of the GFC better than most other nations, but we have largely failed to take advantage.

And that failure has been most clear with household incomes. With nine years of flat income growth in real terms, the rest of the OECD outperformed us, and it cancelled out all the work that occurred during the GFC:

In some ways the past decade has been a tale of two halves. The first half saw household income continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate than previously – well below the mining boom levels and more akin to what was experienced in the 1980s.

But the past five years have been a horror show – household incomes declining in real terms and driven by the familiar story of weak wages growth.

The past five years saw private sector wages grow on average by just 2.0% – nearly half that experienced during the mining boom:

On the broader level the economy over the past decade has merely shunted along, and the past five years have seen average growth levels that would have you assuming at some point we had experienced a recession.

While sometimes averages can hide periods of strength and weakness, the reality is the past decade has seen nothing that can be called strong.

From when the Australian Bureau of Statistics began calculating GDP in 1959 until the end of the last decade, there were 85 quarters where the economy in that quarter alone grew by more than 1%. That equates to five such strong growth quarters every three years.

In the 2010s we have had just two, and both occurred in 2011. When the December 2019 figures come out in March it will have been eight years since the last “strong quarter” – nearly double the previous record length of time without such a boost:

When we move away from the GDP side of things, easily the biggest story of this decade has been interest rates.

We entered the decade with the cash rate at 3.75%, a level still considered extremely low and a carryover from the GFC. It has now been over seven years since the cash rate was that high, and nine years since the Reserve Bank of Australia actually raised interest rates.

For deposit holders the changes have been drastic – at the start of the decade a rate of 6% for a $10,000 term deposit was standard; now the average rate is 1.25% – below inflation:

So low are interest rates now that it is scarcely possible the RBA could return rates to 3.75% in the next decade. To do so would require a period of growth equivalent to that which occurred during the mining boom.

And that is not expected at all.

The decade has also seen significant change in the structure of our economy. Mining has gone from the fourth biggest industry to the largest, and construction and manufacturing have become much less important:

As a result mining contributed the most to GDP growth this decade, while manufacturing actually reduced GDP, as did agriculture due to droughts:

But when we look at employment, the big growth sector is healthcare and social assistance. The increased spending on the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) as well as aged care due to the ageing population has seen the industry go from employing 10.9% of all workers to now accounting for 13.3%:

And it has been a major factor behind the large increase in the participation rate of women. The decade has seen the percent of women in the workforce rise from 58.4% to a record 61.3%, while over the same period the participation rate of men has actually fallen from 72.3% to 71.1%:

It has also been yet another decade where full-time work has become less common for men. In 2009, 83.2% of men in work were working full-time; now it is just 81%, while the percentage of women workers who are full-time has remained static at 54.1%.

And with the decline of full-time work has come the decade’s biggest story of the labour force – underemployment.

In 2009, 5.9% of men were underemployed, now it 6.8%; for women the level has gone from 9.6% to 10.5%, and the rise has been most acute for younger workers, for whom opportunities for full-time work have dried up:

Once again this is a tale of two halves of the decade. In the first half underemployment rose as usual in line with unemployment. Then at the end of 2014 the two measures split – unemployment fell while underemployment rose:

It is a story that continues to be the biggest issue as we move into the new decade. So long as underemployment remains high, wages growth will remain low. And with that low growth will be flat household incomes and stagnant living standards.

This decade has been one of the worst 10 years for Australian living standards. It has seen a structural change in what we consider normal – all for the worse.

As we move into the 2020s the hope for better times remains more hopeful than expected. Interest rates are expected to be cut yet again next year, the government has downgraded its growth forecasts in the midyear economic and fiscal outlook and an expected return to average wages growth of 3% has been pushed out to 2023.

But perhaps the biggest figure that lurks behind all these figures is that in 2009 our greenhouse gas emissions excluding land use were equivalent to 534.9Mt of CO2; this year they have been 553.4Mt.

That will have to fall – and fall drastically.

There are no signs of a recession or an end to our record run of economic growth. But the challenge for Australia in the coming decade will be to increase living standards that have largely remained flat for 10 years. And we will need to do this at the same time we finally face up to the reality of climate change and the impact it will have on our economy.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia