AUSTRALIA'S non-mining businesses are not investing enough to fill the hole that will be left by the slowdown in the resources industry, a senior economist is warning. National Australia Bank chief economist Alan Oster says the Australian economy is in a soft patch and, with business confidence low, there is nothing on the horizon to replace jobs that will be lost as employment falls in the mining sector. Big mining projects are moving from construction to production phase, meaning employment in the sector will fall. "Roughly what you find is four people to build a mine, one person to run it," Mr Oster told a NAB Private Wealth conference in Sydney. The most recent business confidence figures showed corporate sector conditions had hit at a four-year low. Mr Oster predicts two cash rate cuts from the Reserve Bank this year as the central bank seeks to relieve the pressure on unemployment from a weakening economy. "One of the big issues for the Reserve Bank is that they desperately want to see signs of non-mining investment filling in the hole," Mr Oster said. Mr Oster said business confidence was only fair but the economy remained in a soft patch and momentum was not picking up in non-mining sectors. "If non-mining investment is going to pick up you have to ask yourself 'if business isn't that confident, why would they do it?" he said. That's one of the issues that, as a big business bank, we are quite concerned about: we don't see any sign of pick-up in business investment.