A BATCH of economic figures on Thursday brought good news, but it's still too early for high fives.
Retail trade and home building approvals rose more than economists expected, while a survey showed the troubled services sector has stabilised.
Despite that, convincing evidence of a sustained recovery in the non-mining parts of the economy remains elusive.
The headline act was the seasonally adjusted retail trade figures from the ABS, which showed a strong 1.3 per cent rise in February, adding to a 1.2 per cent increase in January.
To put that into perspective, the increase in January and February combined, 2.5 per cent, has already beaten the 2.3 per cent rise recorded over the whole of 2012.
These figures have too much volatility - monthly variations not related to underlying trends of regular seasonal patterns - to be confident that the gains will be sustained.
But they at least show consumers are willing to spend, something which has been a doubtful proposition in the years since the 2008 global financial tilted the balance away from spending and toward saving.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics also released its monthly count of home building approvals from local government.
The headline figure also looked strong.
Approvals rose by 3.1 per cent in February, the latest zag in a zig-zag pattern that's lasted for most of the past year.
The number of approvals was boosted by a rash of public sector housing approvals, dominated by Western Australia.
Even with that one-off boost, the number of residential approvals was only five per cent up from the past year's depressed average.
And it was just two per cent higher than the average of the preceding five years, a period that included the global crisis.
So the February rise can't be seen as evidence of either strength in the building sector or of an upward shift in the trend, which still looks fairly flat.
A routinely neglected aspect of the approvals figures is the value of non-residential approvals, which fell by 11 per cent in February.
That's a big fall but, by itself, no cause for alarm given the extreme volatility of this series.
But the bureau's estimate of the current trend is flat.
And the February level was six per cent below the past year's average and 14 per cent under the average for the past five years.
So, looking at building as a whole, things aren't quite as rosy as the minor rise in home building approvals might suggest at first glance.
Elsewhere, there was some encouraging news from the Australian Industry Group-Commonwealth Bank survey of the services sector.
The survey's main measure, the performance of services index, rose to 49.6 in March, its highest level since January 2012.
It is now tantalisingly close to the 50 mark which is the dividing line between expansion and contraction in the sector.
So things aren't as bad as they were.
More good news, of a sort.
AA
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