Negative gearing was identified as one of the key drains on personal tax collections.
Negatively geared property investors lost an astonishing $13.2 billion in 2010-11, up from $10.1 billion the year before.
The latest Tax Office statistics show the average loss per negatively geared investor was $10,950, up from $9130 the year before.
The average loss for a high-income negatively geared investor earning more than $180,000 was $23,800.
One in every seven Australian taxpayers now a property investor and one in every 10 negatively geared.
The 2010 Henry Tax Review declined to recommend against the practice – its chairman Ken Henry telling a press conference as he was preparing the report that he ”still wears the scars” from an earlier short-lived experiment with limiting negative gearing in the 1980s.