It can't be fun to be on the receiving end of a blast from Alan Jones.

But that's the position Prime Minister Tony Abbott found himself in on Wednesday, when the broadcaster told his listeners on radio station 2GB that the Abbott government's approval of the Shenhua Watermark coal mine was "disgraceful", "beyond belief", and tantamount to selling their soul to mining.

Beginning an almost 30-minute reprimand of the mine, on the Liverpool Plains in north-western NSW, Jones said he had been deluged with emails after "what can only be described as a disgraceful, but not final, decision by the Abbott government and the Environment Minister [Greg] Hunt".