media. One area where he is most in conflict with the Australian and Tasmanian governments is over the issue of Aboriginal Sovereignty. In April 1987, at a conference sponsored by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya called "A Conference on Peace and Revolution in the Pacific", Mansell spoke to a large international audience. 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. 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. In February 2008 Mansell said on Australian radio that although he was happy that the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would offer a formal public apology on behalf of all Australians for the treatment of the "Stolen Generations", he referred to it as a "half-measure" if it was without compensation. 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 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. 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 that he does not believe that Bruce Pascoe has Indigenous ancestry, and Pascoe should stop claiming he does. References 1953 births Australian