SYDNEY - There were signs of strength from different sectors of the economy on Monday.
In one sector, housing construction, the signs were clear, although the other - travel and tourism - is only just beginning to play its part in the economy's long-awaited "rebalancing".
The idea that the economy will automatically rebalance in response to changing circumstances - like the upswing in mining investment and the downswing currently under way - is a persistent theme in most standard economic theorising.
It's a view shared to a greater or lesser extent by the overwhelming majority of economists in academia, the private sector and in policy-making institutions like the Reserve Bank of Australia.
There's more than a bit of irony in that - the main function of the RBA is to try to keep the economy on a balanced, full-employment, low-inflation path because, let's face it, it's not going to manage it all by itself, no matter what the textbooks say.
And there were signs on Monday that the RBA's aggressively helpful interest rate cuts of the past year or so are helping to restore some balance.
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed a rise of nearly two per cent in the value of lending approved for housing in November.
That brought the annual rise to a hefty 25 per cent, with lending slated for new and to-be-built homes - including loans to investors - to 22 per cent.
That works out to $600 million more going into the housing industry every month than a year earlier.
The figures don't include lending funded from overseas, including lending by the offshore branches of local banks, so the undercurrent of strength in demand for housing is likely to be even stronger than the finance approvals numbers suggest.
In travel and tourism, the Australian dollar's depreciation through mid-2013 seems to be having some effect.
The trend in monthly arrivals is positive, to the tune of about four per cent a year, the bureau's figures show.
At the same time the trend in Australian residents heading overseas has topped out and turned negative.
This is what should be expected after an exchange rate depreciation.
But the gap is still around 186,000 a month, with more departures than arrivals.
But it was even bigger at its widest point of 200,000 in June.
Even so, the rate of improvement is painfully slow.
It underscores the RBA's warning, in the minutes of its December policy, meeting that the Aussie dollar "remained uncomfortably high and a lower level would likely be needed to achieve balanced growth in the economy".
At the time, the Australian dollar was buying just over 90 US cents, in line with its value as the travel figures were released a month and half later.
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