Most of their tax liability was wiped out by deducting tax losses from earlier years. In 2010-11, the 70 claimed $118 million in prior tax losses, and still had another $360 million left to carry over to use in future years.

The cost of tax advice was their second biggest deduction. Only 20 claimed deductions for charitable giving, but they claimed $1 million each. Between them, they claimed $26 million in deductions for interest bills.

Part of the problem for the 70 is that they don't seem to be good at business. The 10 who run farms claimed losses averaging $207,000 each. The five who were negatively geared claimed average losses of $260,000 each on rental investments. That helps explain why five also claimed the mature age tax offset as low-income older workers. Most rich people took a different approach. The figures show 99.3 per cent of Australia's millionaires did pay tax in 2010-11 and 98.9 per cent paid a lot: $8.74 billion among them. That 0.1 per cent of taxpayers paid almost 10 per cent of all income tax.

But the figures showed one in four Australians submitting tax returns paid no tax. Data is published for more than 1 million of them and it suggests that while most are genuine low-income earners, many are not - and the 70 income millionaires are just the top of the iceberg of perfectly legal tax avoidance.

For example, 2320 taxpayers with declared incomes of more than $100,000 paid no tax. They earned $75 million in wages and salary, and spent the same amount on tax advice. Their total income of $652 million was cut to a combined taxable income of $604,000 - $260 each.