Michael Mansell

Michael Alexander Mansell (born 5 June 1951) is a Tasmanian Aboriginal (Palawa) activist and lawyer who has campaigned for social, political and legal changes.

Mansell is partly of Palawa descent from the Trawlwoolway group on his mother's side and from the Pinterrairer group on his father's side, both of which are Indigenous groups from north-eastern Tasmania. He was also the founding secretary of the Aboriginal Provisional Government in 1990. Mansell also played senior football for North Hobart in the Tasmanian Football League

Mansell was named "Aboriginal of the Year", at the 1987 National NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee) Awards, and played a crucial role in the drafting of legislation for the Native Title Act 1993 that arose from the Mabo v Queensland case.

Mansell was an independent candidate to represent Tasmania in the Australian Senate at the 1987 Australian federal election held on 11 July 1987. He was unsuccessful, receiving 1,102 votes (21,451 votes were required to win a seat).

Publications Subjects that Mansell has written about include the Australian Constitution, Aboriginal customary law, cultural and intellectual property, the Human Genome Project, land rights and Aboriginal sovereignty. In 2016 his book Treaty and Statehood: Aboriginal self-determination was published. Mansell has often been involved in public confrontation with politicians and the media. One area where he is most in conflict with the Australian and Tasmanian governments is over the issue of Aboriginal Sovereignty.

To gain international attention for the cause of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Mansell established an alternative Aboriginal passport. In 1988 he secured recognition for the passport from Gaddafi's Libya, which declared it valid for travel to Libya. Mansell said he had Gaddafi's support for the establishment of an independent Aboriginal nation.

Mansell has suggested that Indigenous Australians should be granted a separate state or territory within Australia, which would be governed by Indigenous people and allow for greater self-determination

In 2001 Mansell stated that "there were more phoney than real Aborigines in Tasmania and more than half the voters in the 1996 ATSIC election were not Aboriginal". The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre brought court challenges against the claims of Aboriginality of a number of candidates to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. On the first anniversary of the apology, Mansell said that the apology had not improved the situation of Aborigines, nor had the government stopped welfare policies based on race.

Mansell was one of 16 "fair-skinned Aboriginal people" named in a series of articles written by Andrew Bolt and published in the Herald Sun newspaper in 2009. These articles were subsequently found by the Federal Court of Australia in the case Eatock v Bolt to have contravened Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

In his 2016 book Treaty and Statehood: Aboriginal Self-determination, Mansell advocated for a seventh Australian state to be run by indigenous people on land currently deeded to native title, complete with its own state parliament and court system. He also said that such a state may not be created for "at least two or three decades", and felt that treaties or designated seats in the Federal Parliament are more politically likely.

In January 2020, Mansell (as chairman of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania) issued a three-page statement saying he does not believe Bruce Pascoe has Indigenous ancestry, and Pascoe should stop claiming he does.