On Friday, the ATO released the annual taxation statistics. These provide the data on everyone’s 2022-23 tax returns.

If you love spreadsheets, you’ll love this release – one of them has 167 columns of data on everything from how many people earned “less than $0” (110,372) to how many of those who earned more than $1m had a Hecs debt (73). It also revealed that 91 millionaires paid no tax because they were able to reduce their “taxable” income to below the tax-free threshold.

But as most of you are sensible and do not love spreadsheets, let me dive into them and tell you what you need to know.

One of the problems for those wishing to negative gear is that record low interest rates make this rather difficult (this might have broken the record for “most Australian-first-world problem ever written”).

This was the case in 2020-21 and 2021-22 when the cash rate hit 0.1%, and for the first time since John Howard introduced the 50% capital gains tax discount, the number of rental profits exceeded rental losses. But in 2022-23 interest rates rose significantly, and as a result the rental loss numbers also rose (and profits fell):

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Given the lag of rate rises and because some investors might have been able to fix their rates for a period, I suspect this time next year the number of rental losses will rise even more.

I have long joked that if you were an enterprising real estate agent, you could do a lot worse than set up camp wherever anaesthetists and........

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