Is it normal that I dont hear any audio from my .m2t files when playing them in windows media player? I only seem to get to hear the audio when I import the files into Premiere.

That suggests you don't have an MPEG audio decoder installed. No it is not normal.

Try Media Player Classic (aka Guliverkli, just Google it), it has built-in mpeg2 decoder and is much lighter (uses less PC resources).