In an utterly frank interview with Radio host, Alan Jones, Tony Abbott has shown his true colours when it comes to the RET. He called a single wind turbine “visually awful” and noisy.

The Government has also said that cutting the RET was as a result of oversupply of electricity and the watered down RET was reflective of the true 20% target and not a reduction. Mr Abbott has made his feelings perfectly clear now saying that they pushed the Senate for as much as they could in order to reduce the number of wind turbines that can be built in the future – and if he could he would reduce that number even more!

“I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things,” Abbott told Jones, “…when I’ve been up close to these wind farms not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise.”

“What we did recently in the Senate was to reduce, Alan, capital R-E-D-U-C-E, the number of these things that we are going to get in the future … I frankly would have liked to have reduced the number a lot more but we got the best deal we could out of the Senate and if we hadn’t had a deal, Alan, we would have been stuck with even more of these things …”

“What we are managing to do through this admittedly imperfect deal with the Senate is to reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do.”

This particular short-sighted view of Mr Abbotts didn’t once take into account what wind turbines do for our country and our pockets. Or why the rest of the world is pushing for more of them while he is pushing for less. Nor did he choose to say how ‘visually awful,’ noisy and increasingly polluting coal mines. It is quite dumbfounding how someone this limited, thoughtless and short-sighted actually got into politics in the beginning.

“He has clearly said that if he ever gets the chance to scrap the RET, he will. If he ever gets the votes of 6 of the 8 cross bench Senators – the RET is gone. Today he is probably only 1 vote short,” said Australian Solar Council CEO Grimes.

The Australian Wind Alliance’s National Co-ordinator Andrew Bray said, “It’s obvious that rationale was just smoke and mirrors to cover up their real intent: to destroy wind energy in Australia.”

Mark Butler, Shadow Environment Minister, recently said, “We have seen now over the last 12 months a few occasions when Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey go on to Alan Jones’s program to talk about renewable energy, they almost always end up saying something that’s completely ridiculous.”

“It’s gobsmacking that Australia’s Prime Minister can be so short-sighted, and so out of touch,” Butler said in a statement on Thursday. “It’s as if Tony Abbott enjoys making Australia the laughing stock of the world – he so frequently expresses his Jurassic views when it comes to climate change and Australia’s future industries.”

These comments were “an embarrassment,” Butler added, that “would not help Australia’s participation in the negotiations at the upcoming Paris Conference.”