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 understood and implied that the legislature of a country is not intending to deal with persons or matters over which, according to the comity of nations, the jurisdiction properly belongs to some other sovereign or State".

Dixon J returned to the presumption in Wanganui-Rangitikei Electric Power Board v Australian Mutual Provident Society. The "well settled rule of construction", his Honour there explained, is that "an enactment describing acts, matters or things in general words, so that, if restrained by no consideration lying outside its expressed meaning, its intended application would be universal, is to be read as confined to what, according to the rules of international law administered or recognized in our Courts, it is within the province of our law to affect or control".

In R v Foster; Ex parte Eastern and Australian Steamship Co Ltd, Dixon CJ expressed the presumption yet again. He did so, more pithily, in terms which he said were appropriate to be applied to a Commonwealth statute after the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act. He described it as "a presumption which assumes that the legislature is expressing itself only with respect to things which internationally considered are subject to its own sovereign powers".

(Footnotes omitted.)

50 If given the reach contended for by the Commissioner, the removal notice would govern (and subject to punitive consequences under Australian law) the activities of a foreign corporation in the United States (where X Corp's corporate decision-making occurs) and every country where its servers are located; and it would likewise govern the relationships between that corporation and its users everywhere in the world. The Commissioner, exercising her power under s 109, would be deciding what users of social media services throughout the world were allowed to see on those services. The content to which access may be denied by a removal notice is not limited to Australian content. In so far as the notice prevented content being available to users in other parts of the world, at least in the circumstances of the present case, it would be a clear case of a national law purporting to apply to "persons or matters over which, according to the comity of nations, the jurisdiction properly belongs to some other sovereign or State". Those "persons or matters" can be described as the relationships of a foreign corporation with users of its services who are outside (and have no connection with) Australia. What X Corp is to be permitted to show to users in a particular country is something that the "comity of nations" would ordinarily regard as the province of that country's government.

51 The potential consequences for orderly and amicable relations between nations, if a notice with the breadth contended for were enforced, are obvious. Most likely, the notice would be ignored or disparaged in other countries. (The parties on this application tendered reports by experts on US law, who were agreed that a US court would not enforce any injunction granted in this case to require X Corp to take down the 65 URLs.) eSafety Commissioner v X Corp [2024] FCA 499