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Wednesday 29 March 2023
For all advertising and editorial needs, call 03 5974 9000 or email: team@mpnews.com.au www.mpnews.com.au ELITE Pacific island weightlifters joined gold medal-winning weightlifter Eileen Cikamatana in Dromana on Friday 24 March, as they trained for the Pacific Elite International Weightlifting Tournament in Hawthorn on Saturday. The Samoan athletes were brought to Dromana by peninsula resident and international weightlifting coach Paul Coffa MBE who said he wanted to give peninsula residents a chance to see the athletes in action before the weekend tournament. After competing and the working as Australia’s national coach, Coffa moved to Nauru decades ago as weightlifting was taking off around the Pacific, before moving back to Australia during the pandemic. Fijian-born Cikamatana, who also moved to the Mornington Peninsula during COVID to train at Coffa’s Dromana gym, was a star attraction of the tournament. Coffa - who was last year inducted into the IWF Hall of Fame after more than 60 years of service to the sport - said the athletes were “superstars” who had a good chance of winning gold at the next Commonwealth Games. He said Saturday’s tournament gave the audience three hours of “worldclass weightlifting”.
Power display by Pacific weightlifters
Picture: Yanni
Power struggle over port use Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au THE state government’s apparent willingness to increase the use and size of the Port of Hastings has put it on a collision course with environment and community groups and Mornington Peninsula Shire Council. The main points of contention at the moment are the government’s approval of Esso using methane gas powered generators at Long Island Point, Japan’s intention to spend $2.35
billion exporting liquified hydrogen gas from Hastings and a terminal being built to assemble and ship wind generators to Bass Strait. The recent big budget proposals for the port follow years of relative peace on the docks with the defeat of AGL’s liquified gas plan for Crib Point and the moving to Bay West in Port Phillip of a container port. Shire councillors last week voted “as a matter of urgency” to seek clarification from the state government about protecting Western Port’s environment with the project involving
gasification of hydrogen made from brown coal and the disposal of carbon the process produces. That decision was made in the same week that the Victorian National Parks Association launched an appeal to raise money to fight against Western Port becoming “an industrial wasteland”. An email sent by the NPA’s executive director Matt Ruchel said Western Port was “neglected and under threat”. Ruchel said the association and the community had defeated the AGL gas import terminal “but this time, it’s not to stop a specific threat, but many”.
Permanent protection was needed to keep the bay “safe, healthy … [and] remove the temptation for industry, developers and governments to exploit this world-class wetland”. In council on Tuesday 21 March Cr David Gill said it was important to ask the state government to consider the Mornington Peninsula “before they just make another decision before our community has an opportunity to have a say”. “The state government has announced it was agreeing to a hydrogen gas export program and now we’re
going to be looking at what their intentions are,” he said. After the Tuesday 21 March council meeting, the mayor Cr Steve Holland told The News that the state planning minister had approved a planning scheme amendment giving the go ahead for Esso to generate electricity at its Long Island Point fractionation plant (“Esso stands by to power up” The News 5/12/22). “In recent weeks there has been renewed interest in the Port of Hastings and its future,” he said. Continued Page 6
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