Tony Abbott was almost certainly telling the truth when he told Alan Jones he would have preferred to cut the number of new windfarms even more than may occur under the revised renewable energy target – and that this was always his aim.

It’s just that his newfound frankness contradicts claims he and his ministers made before and after the election about how committed they were to renewable energy.

Before the election Abbott said this: “Look, we originated a renewable energy target. That was one of the policies of the Howard government and yes we remain committed to a renewable energy target … we have no plans to change the renewable energy target.” (The Coalition did promise the target would be reviewed.)

On Thursday, urged on by the virulently anti-windfarm Jones, he said this: “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 likely 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.”

Abbott said the RET had been “put in place in the late days of the Howard government” but also that he regretted it. “Knowing what we know now I don’t think we would have done things this way, but at the time we thought it was the right way forward.”

He’s said it now, confirming what many people watching the government’s tortured policy-making on the issue had long been suspecting.

After the election, Abbott took responsibility for the renewable energy target review himself and appointed businessman and self-professed climate sceptic Dick Warburton to head it.

The head of his business advisory council, Maurice Newman, another climate sceptic and campaigner against windfarms, had already been publicly urging him to scrap the RET altogether.

Initially he argued the review was needed because the RET was forcing up power prices, but then modelling, including some commissioned by the review itself, found this was not true.

The policy divided the cabinet, with leaks revealing Abbott favouring the idea of closing the RET to any new investment and the environment minister, Greg Hunt, and the industry minister, Ian Macfarlane, fighting for it to be “pared back” rather than closed – although Abbott never said this publicly. He sent initial drafts back, asking the review to do more work on ways to close the scheme to new entrants.

In the end the review provided two recommendations – allowing the government to either close or pare back the target.

But a huge public backlash, enormous voter support for renewable energy and steadfast opposition from Labor and the Greens and crossbench senators overwhelmed the government’s intentions – forcing it into negotiations with Labor, which resulted in a deal to cut the target from 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy by 2020 to 33,000 gigawatt hours.

Hunt hailed this as evidence of the government’s deep support for renewable energy and the fact that it was always going to keep its election promise.

Talking about the deal in May, he said: “We’ve just struck an agreement on renewable energy and I’m a deep, strong, real supporter of it.

“This means additional renewable energy projects around the country whether it’s wind or solar or whether it’s other forms of renewable energy.”

But now we know the truth. The prime minister wishes there were fewer windfarms (which provide about a third of Australia’s renewable energy) and would like to have reduced the RET much further in order to achieve that outcome and kind of wishes we didn’t have it.

“What we’ve achieved today, I think, is certainty for the renewable energy sector,” Hunt said when he announced the RET deal.

That probably depends on who in the government the industry listens to, and on what day.

But despite the prime minister’s now-public reservations, the RET deal is set to be legislated. The anti-wind lobby in the coalition is not satisfied.

Before the election, Coalition MPs were backing the claims that windfarms damaged human health – claims promoted in affected communities at grassroots rallies that were sometimes organised and publicised by groups connected with the climate-sceptic Australian Environment Foundation (AEF).

At the time Newman was involved in a group called the Crookwell District Landscape Guardians, lobbying against a windfarm proposed in the vicinity of his southern highlands property. He was also threatening to sue a neighbouring farmer if he allowed wind turbines on his property or if they caused harm to his health or property values.

In a report released in February, the National Health and Medical Research Council concluded that “there is currently no consistent evidence that windfarms cause adverse health effects in humans”, backing scores of other scientific studies.

But now another Senate inquiry is yet again looking at the claims – and whether there is a need for more regulations and guidelines. Liberal National party senator Matthew Canavan told a recent television report he thought wind turbines might turn out to the “the pink batts of the air”.

It seems unlikely any industry can ever achieve certainty unless it can operate for more than five minutes without changes to laws and regulations and unless it can be confident that politicians mean what they say.