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

[2] Mansell's parents grew up on the Cape Barren Island reserve and moved to Launceston after World War II for employment reasons.

Mansell left school at the age of 15 and took a job at the Bell Bay aluminium smelter, later working for Tasmanian Government Railways as a labourer where he was "sacked when he punched a workmate who taunted him about his Aboriginal origins".

[5] Mansell also played senior football for North Hobart in the Tasmanian Football League[6] 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.

[7][1] In the wider Australian community, Mansell has often been seen as controversial, having resorted to confrontational tactics to push issues of Indigenous rights and past mistreatment onto the public agenda in Tasmania.

[13] Mansell was one of 16 pale-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.