Arlo :
you said people don't invest to make money by negative gearing but there are loopholes there. you can deduct interest applied to mortgage, you can get real estate agents to prompt tenants to request "repairs" to upgrade the house, you can use a renovation loan for the property deduct that interest too, perform a small amount of capital works which can be depreciated (separate to the other deductions), along with countless other things. if you're retired and living off super, you had none or low taxable income, so negatively gearing all of that would likely take you done to zero tax liability., if you sold an investment property after claiming the CGT discount, you apply the considerable negative gearing deductions (as they're a rental loss not a capital loss.), ending up with effectively the 50% capital gain as taxable, then reduced further by the negative gearing, meaning if you had a 200k gain, you could half it to 100k, then deduct potentially 30-40k off that from your negative gearing throughout the year leaving far less than 50% of the gain taxable.
There's a good reason these rules changed the way they did
2026-05-16 15:04:09