The government is wasting more than $600,000 on windfarm “conspiracy theories”, Labor said, after a report revealed the salary of the newly appointed wind commissioner, Andrew Dyer.

Fairfax Media has obtained Dyer’s contract and it showed the government is paying him $205,000 a year for the three-year, part-time role.

“Taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for the Liberal government’s climate scepticism with revelations today its windfarm commissioner is costing more than $600,000 in salary alone,” the shadow environment minister, Mark Butler, said. “The cost of the position is likely to be closer to $1m, with three staff seconded from the environment department.”

Butler labelled it a “shocking waste of money”, and criticised the government over how it spent public funds.

“It says everything about the priorities of the Turnbull government that they have appointed a commissioner for windfarms, but refuse to appoint a full-time disability discrimination commissioner,” he said.

The government cut the funding of the Human Rights Commission in its first budget, meaning disability discrimination commissioner Graeme Innes’s position was not filled once his term expired in July 2014. Instead, age discrimination commissioner, Susan Ryan, took on the disability portfolio.

In June, the environment minister, Greg Hunt, had promised to create the new position of wind commissioner to ascertain health complaints resulting from turbine noise, as part of a deal with crossbench senators to pass legislation on renewable energy.

Dyer, an academic who serves on the boards of Climateworks Australia and the Monash University sustainability unit, was appointed in October.

Innes was scathing of the decision to create a new commissioner without replacing the disability portfolio.

“It sends a very clear message about where people with disabilities fall in the pecking order,” he told Fairfax Media in June. “Clearly, we fall below strong lobbyists.”

On Sunday, shadow parliamentary secretary, Terri Butler, criticise the government’s funding priorities on Twitter.

2 unfilled vacancies for federal cct court judges. Cct court gets 90% of family law cases. Yet Aus has a $600k windfarm cmr #priorities — Terri Butler MP (@terrimbutler) November 28, 2015

The former prime minister, Tony Abbott, spoke publicly about his dislike of turbines, saying in June that they are potentially harmful and “visually awful”.

In 2014, the then treasurer, Joe Hockey, had labelled windfarms “utterly offensive”.

“I drive to Canberra to go to parliament and I must say I find those wind turbines around Lake George to be utterly offensive. I think they’re a blight on the landscape,” he said in May 2014.

Labor has set a target of 50% of energy coming from renewable sources by 2030, including wind turbines.