Lloyds Banking Group has racked up £3 billion in impairment charges in Australia since the financial crisis began to strike at the value of the commercial property developments it funded.This figure is small beer by the standards of the major domestic banks and equal to roughly a quarter of the losses incurred by foreign banks in Australia since the crisis began. Financial results for Lloyds published in the UK on Friday show the bank's operations in Australia and New Zealand incurred an impairment charge of £1.03 billion in the year to December 2011. There was a moderation in the bad debt charge in the second half of the year, at £417 million compared with £586 million in the first half.Lloyds sold more than £1 billion in impaired loans over the year. With new impairments, however, the level of impaired loans as a percentage of all loans was 28.5 per cent at the end of 2011, around the same proportion as in 2010.