"This particular policy was a policy that was put in place in the late days of the Howard government," Mr Abbott said when asked why the government was subsidising wind farms but not other struggling rural businesses. Wind farm opponents have long claimed proximity to turbines can cause a range of health issues. Credit:Rohan Thomson "Knowing what we know now, I don't think we would have gone down this path in this way. At the time we thought it was the right way forward. Sometimes you have got to deal with the situation that you have got rather than the ideal, and what we have managed to do through this admittedly imperfect but better-than-the-alternative deal with the Senate is reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do." And in a contradiction of multiple scientific analyses, including a 2015 review undertaken by the federal government's own National Health and Medical Research Council, Mr Abbott appeared to lend his prime ministerial authority to claims that the turbines cause illness. "Well Alan look, I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things," Mr Abbott said.

The NH&MRC research had found no such thing but rather had called for more rigorous testing, noting that to date, there was no consistent evidence of negative health impacts from wind farms. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has refused to confirm or deny whether or not the allegations are true. Credit:Gene Ramirez Opponents of wind farms have long claimed a range of side-effects from proximity to turbines, which are said to generate audible noise as well as low-frequency "infrasound" waves not detectable to human ears but harmful nonetheless. "When I've been up close to these wind farms, there's no doubt, not only are they visually awful, they make a lot of noise," Mr Abbott said. "What we did recently in the Senate was reduce, Alan, reduce, capital R-E-D-U-C-E the number of these things that we are going to get in the future," he said.

"Now I would frankly have liked to have reduced the number a lot more ... but we got the best deal we could," Mr Abbott added. He said the renewable energy target which, as currently agreed, mandates that 33,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity be produced from renewable sources including wind by 2020, was merely the lowest number the government could achieve within the current Parliament. The RET deal was struck between the government and the opposition in May after many months of uncertainty during which billions of dollars of investment was put on hold while the Abbott government-initiated Warburton Review examined its efficiency. It was an open secret in government and industry circles that the aim of that review was to expose the RET as the culprit in driving up household electricity prices, in order to dump it altogether. However, the government could not make the case and the Senate refused to comply.

While Environment Minister Greg Hunt has worked effectively to build the government's green bona fides with voters, succeeding in a series of climate-related initiatives, Mr Abbott's comments will fuel longstanding suspicions that the Prime Minister is not personally convinced. A Senate Select Committee into wind turbines is under way but Labor's senator Anne Urquhart who is a member of that inquiry, said it had heard "no expert evidence" to support claims of health impacts. "There have been 25 reviews into the issue across the globe and not one has found evidence that wind farms are detrimental to human health," she said. "Health Canada came to the same conclusion after undertaking a large-scale epidemiological study of over 1200 households, which included 4000 hours of acoustic data, medical expertise, self-reporting and objective health measures including hair cortisol, blood pressure and heart rates."