THE Reserve Bank has confirmed it plans to keep interest rates steady, and the latest economic figures give no reason to suspect that plan will change in the near future.
In announcing the cash rate would be kept at its multi-decade low of 2.5 per cent, the central bank said the safest approach, the way the economy stands at the moment, "is likely to be a period of stability in interest rates".
That was much the same as the wording from every monthly announcement so far this year.
So was the rest of the statement, for that matter.
And economic figures released on Tuesday illustrate the reason for the RBA's fence-sitting.
One was the little-watched estimate of government spending.
It shows the government's direct contribution to economic activity - including investment in infrastructure and the cost of providing government services, which is mainly the cost of labour employed in the process.
Although public sector spending amounts to nearly one quarter of gross domestic product, it will add only 0.1 percentage points to GDP growth in the year to March.
And it will actually cut growth by 0.2 in the March quarter itself.
The rest of the economy will have to do the heavy lifting if economic growth is to be strong enough to stop unemployment from rising.
A lot of the nation's hopes rest on the shoulders of the mining sector.
There was goods news on this front from foreign trade figures from the ABS on Tuesday.
There was faster export growth, driven by minerals, which means a boost to GDP.
And there was a fall in imports, meaning a bigger slice of spending goes into local production rather than production offshore.
Those trends in trade will add 1.4 percentage points to economic growth in the March quarter.
That's a lot considering the long-run average for quarterly GDP growth is about 0.8 per cent.
But it's not as positive as it seems.
For a start, a good chunk export growth was achieved by running down stocks of minerals - a negative fro growth - rather than increasing production.
And the mining sector is heading into the mining phase, which requires fewer workers, and out of the more labour-intensive investment phase.
On the other side of the trade account, declining imports is generally a sign of a weak economy, not a strong one.
In this case the fall in imports was the result of an ongoing slump in imports of capital goods, which are now down by 27 per cent from their peak just under two years ago.
There's no sign in the imports figures of a growth surge outside of mining.
And this is what the RBA has been faced with all year.
Economic growth, yes, but just not quite strong enough and no real sign that things are about to change.
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