This Act is designed to help you identify accurately and quickly the provisions that are relevant to your purpose in reading the income tax law.

The Act contains tables, diagrams and signposts to help you navigate your way.

You can start at Division 3 (What this Act is about) and follow the signposts as far into the Act as you need to go. You may also encounter signposts to several areas of the law that are relevant to you. Each one should be followed.

Sometimes they will lead down through several levels of detail. At each successive level, the rules are structured in a similar way. They will often be preceded by a Guide to the rules at that level. The rules themselves will usually deal first with the general or most common case and then with the more particular or special cases.

This Act is arranged in a way that reflects the principle of moving from the general case to the particular.

In this respect, the conceptual structure of the Act is something like a pyramid. The pyramid shape illustrates the way the income tax law is organised, moving down from the central or core provisions at the top of the pyramid, to general rules of wide application and then to the more specialised topics.

(1) Many of the terms used in the income tax law are defined.

(2) Most defined terms in this Act are identified by an asterisk appearing at the start of the term: as in "*business". The footnote that goes with the asterisk contains a signpost to the Dictionary definitions starting at section 995-1.

(1) Once a defined term has been identified by an asterisk, later occurrences of the term in the same subsection are not usually asterisked.

(2) Terms are not asterisked in the non-operative material contained in this Act.

(3) The following basic terms used throughout the Act are not identified with an asterisk. They fall into 2 groups:

Within a definition, the defined term is identified by bold italics.

Two main purposes of the numbering system in this Act are:

There are gaps in the numbering system to allow for the insertion of new Divisions and sections.

Except where the gaps follow a regular pattern, notes are included at the end of one group of units to indicate the number of the next unit.

In addition to the operative provisions themselves, this Act contains other material to help you identify accurately and quickly the provisions that are relevant to you and to help you understand them.

This other material falls into 2 main categories.

The first is the "Guides". A Guide consists of sections under a heading indicating that what follows is a Guide to a particular Subdivision, Division etc.

Guides form part of this Act but are kept separate from the operative provisions. In interpreting an operative provision, a Guide may only be considered for limited purposes. These are set out in section 950-150.

The other category consists of material such as notes and examples. These also form part of the Act. They are distinguished by type size from the operative provisions, but are not kept separate from them.