It's up to business now to carry the flag.
Money is cheap, the dollar is low, global confidence is rising alongside commodity prices, and even on the normally barren turf of industrial relations there has been a big win with this week's Fair Work Commission decision to cut Sunday penalty rates.
From the government to the Reserve Bank of Australia, companies and investors are being urged to think long-term, think infrastructure and contribute to producing the economic growth that will eventually help stabilise the federal budget, allow official interest rates to climb and pull the country out of what some have lamented is the "new mediocrity".
It's a provocative challenge.
But it's been expressed in varying form by two big players this week – by Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe and former Treasury secretary Ken Henry.
Both are suggesting strongly that there's no point lamenting the parlous state of politics, or a lack of monetary policy stimulus, or uncertainty about the future and to get on with the job of investing capital for tomorrow rather than delivering a short-term dividend payout.
Lowe couldn't have been more blunt on Friday, telling parliamentarians in his bi-annual testimony that the levers for producing more growth no longer lie with the Reserve Bank. Monetary policy stimulus won't do much more to help, he said, and would almost certainly make the high cost of housing and debt levels worse if rates were cut again.
Stop looking for excuses and double down on building the assets that would make the economy more productive and allow people to find good homes near work, he suggested. The cost and availability of money, he pointed out, is no constraint to this.
Likewise Ken Henry, despondent about the state of political debate and prospects for economic reform, delivered a barn burning speech on Thursday that essentially argued business is better off going it alone. Tackle the difficult challenges of building better cities, capacity and fixing energy uncertainty without waiting for government.
As Lowe told a parliamentary hearing on Friday, there are growing reasons for optimism, with business surveys over the last two or three months reporting a significant lift in sentiment, which could be helped if parliament supports business.
"That's important because for three years now I think people have been waiting," he said. "There is a lots of uncertainty around—political uncertainty, uncertainty about China, uncertainty about technology, and uncertainty about high levels of debt.
"Businesses are going to say, 'I will just wait a bit longer.' But just recently there seems to be a bit more there, and whatever the parliament can do to encourage that is fantastic."
This week's Fair Work move to lower Sunday and public holiday penalty rates for retail, fast food, pharmacy and hospitality workers is another step in the right direction for business.
Against howls of protest from Labor, unions and social media, Lowe was among the most prominent defenders of the decision on Friday, saying while it would mean fewer dollars for certain workers, it would ultimately result in more people being employed.
Cutting wages will in the short-term enable business to hire more staff, put on extra services, and compete more aggressively. If that happens, in the log run the broader community wins.
It's part of a broader story of wage restraint that the rest of the country has been forced to swallow in the wake of the falling terms of trade since 2012.
Almost as if to hammer home the point, the Fair Work decision was announced only a day after official figures confirmed that annual wages growth in the private sector have crashed to a record low 1.8 per cent.
Overall wages growth – a figure that includes the faster-rising public sector – is running only slightly better at 1.9 per cent, which is far below the 3.2 per cent average of the past decade, and a universe away from the 4 per cent growth that dominated the 2005 to 2009 period.
"Lower wage growth lowers spending, but lower wage growth may also create more jobs and I think this is one of the reasons we have managed in recent times in the aftermath of the mining boom with the unemployment rate sitting in the fives or low sixes most of the time," said Lowe.
"When more people have jobs, they feel like they have more security and are slightly more willing to spend."
In the short-term, however, weak wages growth will only reinforce the soft inflation outlook, something that needs to change before Lowe can begin hiking rates.
As he warned this week, raising borrowing costs while wages growth is slowing is a recipe for failure.
While many Australians are coping reasonably well thanks to ultra-low mortgage rates, they're living with the "sobering combination" of record debt and the slowest nominal wages growth in decades, he said..
For some people, the move to reduce Sunday penalty rates for staff in shops, restaurants, takeaways and pharmacies seems like a strange way to support the economy.
Labor and the unions were quick to argue that cutting the wages of low-paid weekend workers will mean less money – by one estimate, around $1 billion less – is spent by those very same people across the rest of the economy.
"We do not accept that cutting people's pay will have a positive benefit on either their lives, their standard of living or the economy," thundered ACTU president Ged Kearney.
But business groups countered the union outrage saying that cutting high Sunday rates would allow more shops to open, boosting employment and the economy more broadly.
It may be no coincidence that the collapse in wages growth has come at the same time as a widespread surge in unhappiness about politics, big institutions, and big business.
Politics in the low-wage era has also become frustratingly ineffective. With little money to splash around – remember that low wages growth also hurts the tax "wages" of the government – tough policy proposals that help the majority but require the losers to be bailed out, have no hope in hell. There is no money spare in a budget firmly stuck in structural deficit.
Capturing the mood of how woeful this process has become was Henry, who on Thursday unleashed a blistering tirade that has clearly been building for some time.
"Our politicians have dug themselves into deep trenches from which they fire insults designed merely to cause political embarrassment. Populism supplies the munitions," he said.
"And the whole dreadful spectacle is broadcast live via multimedia, 24/7.
"The country that Australians want cannot even be imagined from these trenches."
"The reform narrative of an earlier period has been buried by the language of fear and danger. It doesn't seek to explain; rather, it seeks to confuse and frighten ... Meanwhile the platform burns."
There are many reasons why Henry will continue to observe a political class paralysed by its own dysfunction.
Aside from a government wedged by its own far right flank, it comes back to an issue related to weak wages.
Many households may not have stressed too much in the early days of falling income growth, which started in earnest in 2012 as the terms of trade peaked, because the Reserve Bank was busy slashing interest rates.
At the same time, a deflationary global trend was putting downward pressure on imported goods, and a surge in competition among retailers like Coles and Woolies, as well as foreign entrants like Aldi – helped keep prices down.
The traditional basket of goods that makes up the consumer price index had been rising more slowly - offsetting the impact of lower wages.
That seems to have changed in the last year or so, as the benefits of global deflation run their course. Retail sales have been weak for months, and confidence among consumers has been skittish.
Then there's mortgages. The lack of wages growth makes it very difficult for heavily indebted households to work away their liabilities.
The Reserve Bank warns that chances are slim that the labour market – which has seen unemployment stuck slightly below 6 per cent for the best part of the last year – will be the source of any significant inflation pressure any time soon.
Lowe, who said this week that wages growth will stay below average "for some time yet", needs inflation to quicken from around 1.5 per cent to between 2 to 3 per cent target range.
Without wages to kindle that inflation he will have no remit to hike official interest rates.
Which partly explains his frustration with the lack of infrastructure investment, something that could help spur productivity, incomes and growth more generally.
Even more fundamentally, however, Lowe warned that failure to address shortfalls in urban transportation will make overcrowding worse and fuel "insidious" resentment of immigrants.
"Population in our cities is becoming more and more crowded. People are getting frustrated," Lowe said.
Unfortunately for Lowe, he is trapped in a classic "chicken-and-egg" dilemma. A lack of return on capital, because official rates are so low, has prompted many companies to take the easy stock-price-boosting path of returning that capital to shareholders, rather than investing in future growth.
There are growing hopes that 2017 will mark a turning point – triggered by a US-led supply shock in the form of infrastructure spending and tax cuts.
But waiting for external events – or even Canberra – to drive Australia's own fortunes is likely to be a recipe for disappointment.
As Ken Henry said this week, the real onus is on business, and by extension individuals, to get on with the job of boosting growth irrespective of what a dysfunctional political system is doing.
"How much of what Australian business thinks needs to be done in the Australian economy to build a stronger community and stronger workforce to enhance the profitability of their own businesses.... can we do ourselves?
"We've always thought that government wrote the rules, and we have to rely on government to write the rules … but I would say that it's such a shambles that business should be asking themselves the question: 'To what extent can we do this ourselves?'"
Ultimately, what Henry, Lowe and others are yearning for is leadership.
