we should not, we think, be justified in assuming that the Tasmanian Parliament intended the general words of their enactment to have an application which would conflict with the Constitution of the Commonwealth. In our view, therefore, the Tasmanian Statute under consideration should be construed as not applying to a receipt given by a federal officer under the circumstances of this case.
The problem was stated by Dixon J., as he then was, in Bank of New South Wales v. The Commonwealth [2] , as follows:
when a statute or statutory instrument goes beyond the Constitution the question for the Court is whether a provision too widely or generally expressed should be confined in its operation to so much of the subject it is capable of covering as is constitutionally competent to the legislature, or, as it is sometimes said, whether the general words are to be read and applied distributively.
His Honour went on to point out [3] , that, in the absence of an expressed severability clause in an Act:
no severance could be effected unless an inference that the provisions are not to be interdependent can be positively drawn from the nature of the provisions, from the manner in which they are expressed, or from the fact that they independently affect the persons or things within power in the same way and with the same results as if the full intended operation of the legislation had been valid.
This principle, so it seems to me, applies with additional force when the only vice that is attributed to the law of a State is that it does not expressly exempt the Commonwealth from its operation: D'Emden v. Pedder [4] ; Municipal Council of Sydney v. The Commonwealth [5] . Thus a State law prohibiting the use of firearms within the State, except with police authority, and doing so without exempting members of the military forces of the Commonwealth, would not, in the absence of an express exemption in their favour, be an invalid law. The natural construction of the law would be to treat it as having no application to soldiers. There are, of course, cases where it would be difficult to be sure that a State law was not intended to apply to the Commonwealth, but, in most cases, it would be so obvious that reliance upon express reading down provisions is unnecessary. This, I think, is such a case. Here, it seems to me, that the exclusion of the Commonwealth and of Commonwealth land from the restrictions and prohibitions of the scheme was so obviously necessary for validity that it is proper to conclude that such exclusion was intended, and, the mere fact that there are no express words of exclusion, does not warrant the invalidation of the scheme as a whole. Not only is there no difficulty about the scheme operating without it imposing any obligations upon the Commonwealth or in relation to Commonwealth land, but some recognition that its commands were not addressed to the Commonwealth is, as it seems to me, to be found in the way in which the Commonwealth lands have been treated in the scheme map. It is, I think, a fair reading of the map that the scheme was not intended to operate in respect of Commonwealth lands which were shown upon the map with a description of the way in which they were being used by the Commonwealth. Thus, for instance, one area is simply called "Kingsford Smith Aerodrome", another "Military Reserve", and another "under the control of the Commonwealth Government".
1. (1904) 1 C.L.R. 91, at p. 120.
2. (1948) 76 C.L.R. 1, at p. 369.
3. (1948) 76 C.L.R., at p. 370.
4. (1904) 1 C.L.R. 91.
5. (1904) 1 C.L.R. 208.