The baton hasn’t actually fallen to the ground yet, but the handover from mining to the rest of the economy is not going at all smoothly.

The latest capital spending and building approvals figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirm the rebalancing process is underway, but not proceeding quite as elegantly as hoped.

The major figure from the bureau on Thursday was the estimate of business capital spending, which showed a fall of five per cent in the March quarter, after adjusting for price changes and the regular seasonal pattern.

That followed a two per cent fall in the December quarter after the rising trend had stalled in the September quarter, so the last time capital spending actually rose is now over a year ago.

The celebrated mining sector was the main culprit for the latest quarterly fall in investment in buildings, structures, equipment and machinery, with a drop of six per cent.

But the other sectors measured by the bureau’s survey are still groping clumsily for the baton.

In those other sectors, capital spending has fallen for six of the past eight quarters, including the most recent two, to be 17 per cent below its peak reached a year and half ago.

It’s as if the third runner in the relay team is trying to hand over to the sprinter running the anchor leg but both are slowing down.

There are grounds for cautious optimism from housing, the sector most often cited as the key to the rebalancing.

The bureau’s estimate of residential building approvals recorded a seasonally adjusted jump of nine per cent in April, consistent with the theme that housing is emerging as a positive influence on the economy.

But the April rise followed a six per cent fall in March.

And there’s a good chance that the down-up pattern may be related to the late-March timing of Easter this year – it’s usually well into April and the seasonal adjustment process does not always deal with that variation very effectively.

So the rebound in April may reflect nothing more than the backlog of processing of building applications from March that was subsequently worked through by local councils in April.

On top of that, there was a zag in the zig-zag pattern in the volatile non-residential component of building approvals.

The fall of 10 per cent after a 25 per cent rise in March left the April value of approvals in this category almost in line with the average of the preceding three months.

When the handover is complete, the economy stands a good chance of getting back up to full pace, but the way things are looking at the moment, there’s a fair bit of fumbling to come before that happens.