Well, of course the removal of NG wouldn't be any good by simply removing it. I don't think anyone has ever advocated that. If NG were to be done away with then of course taxes would differ greatly too. A flat tax would simply mean everyone pays the same rate. Rich or poor or inbetween. Most opponents of FT can't envisage a system that gives no-one the edge & therefore thepresent monopolies would become thing of the past.
Get rid of asset tests until the asset actually becomes an asset i.e. when the asset is sold.
Want to start a business ? Save & borrow & as you make a profit you pay back the loan.
No taking the mates for dinner or buying a boat or holidays overseas for "the business" & writing it all off for all the taxpayers to make up the shortfall.
How about a little patience to make more money ? Keep your services/goods affordable. Can"t be done without NG I hear you say ? Well, how about giving it a go before dismissing something that's good for all in favour of something that's overly generous for a few.

The reason negative gearing was introduced in the first place was to generate additional housing by getting investors to build new houses and also stimulate the building industry and therefore the economy.

It has since become a tax minimisation vehicle so people can invest in existing property (93% on negative gearing is for existing property) and get the interest effectively paid by taxpayers and has spread to other forms of investment, like the share market.

In other words it has changed from it's original purpose and in most cases produces nothing of benefit for society but personal gain for the individual.

It has since become a tax minimisation vehicle..
rache,
Precisely, thar's what's causing the inequality problems plagueing society. One lot pays hardly any tax & the other can no no longer bear the level of tax thrown at them.
To bring the the economic down-slide to a halt only one system will wor-Flat Tax. It is the only system that can revive incentive to work & save. It'd bring a level of prosperity never known in this country before. Imagine all the money that is presently going into the coffers of other countries, staying right here. Imagine the local enterpeneurs coming to life. The only casualty would be greed.

rache you claim that NG "in most cases produces nothing of benefit for society
but personal gain for the individual". This is simply WRONG. NG gearing does provide a huge benefit to society, specifically it encourages investors to supply rental properties and this benefits renters. And just to make it clear, renters include almost all of the less-well-off, ie. the poor benefit from NG.

Another missunderstanding you seem to have is the impression that whenever an investor buys a dwelling for renting-out it comes at the long term of consquence of decreasing the number of dwellings available to the home-buyer. This is simply WRONG. The number of dwellings available is not fixed and the partition of dwellings for renting v's home-ownership is NOT a zero sum game!!
Even if investors exclusively bought existing houses it doesn't mean that home-buyers have to miss out on buying houses. I'll demonstrate this by comparing two scenarios in the following hypotheticals:
Case 1:
A potential land-lord builds a new dwelling and rents it out.
Case 2:
A potential land-lord buys an existing house from an existing owner-occupier and rents it out. The owner-occupier then builds a new dwelling with the money from the sale and moves in.
Results: Note that in both cases the overall result is same in terms of number of dwellings and newly housed people, ie. the number of dwellings increase by one and a renter is now newly housed.

Repeating the figure I've already given: our population increases by approx 400,000 EACH year. And a chuck of that increase* needs to find NEW rental accommodation each year. So EVERY year new rental dwellings need to be provided and it is provided by investors. But note, the new rentals provided DON'T have to be a newly constructed dwellings- but they still MUST be provided for everyone to be housed

** continued from above **
What would be a problem for new home-owners is if investors bought dwellings but didn't rent them out- eg: people who buy personal holiday homes. But this has nothing to do with NG because NG can't be claimed for this sort of investment (ie: NG can only be claimed for an active business, it cannot be claimed for purely appreciating asset investments).

By-the-way there is a reason why many landlords wouldn't rent out brand new buildings. It is because most tenants wouldn't care for it the same way an owner-occupier does. Often, if you let tenants a brand-new building, chances are that you will lose more money to damage they cause than you collect in rent. This is especially true these days because of our anti-discrimination laws: they prevent landlords from minimizing the risk they take with potential bad tenants and as a consequence the landlord has to drop down the quality of their lets to a level that suits the worst type of tenant (ie: they buy the worst houses in a suburb for rentals since they can't stop riff-raff rubbish tenants from renting them)

*: a higher proportion than the percentage of renters in general population since the majority of the population increase is by migrants, and migrants have a higher proportion who are initially long-term or even life time renters than the general population