Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott swallowed his pride yesterday and abandoned a plan to reshape the country’s universal healthcare system by charging patients a fee to see their doctor.

The A$7 “co-payment” fee (£3.71), which had been included in an unpopular May budget, had been heavily criticised by the opposition and healthcare professionals as a sign that Australia was moving toward a US healthcare model.

It was sharply attacked by Labour and opposition Greens, who accused Mr Abbott of resorting to regulatory changes to the health system because he was too politically weak to bring about legislative changes.

Dumping the controversial policy represents a major blow for his struggling conservative government and is the latest in a string of reverses for Mr Abbott, whose Liberal-National coalition government has hit record low approval ratings.

“The $7 Medicare co-payment measure announced in the 2014-15 budget will no longer proceed,” Mr Abbott said.

“The government has listened to the views of the community,” he claimed.

Instead, it will cut the rebate it pays to doctors, Mr Abbott said, encouraging them to charge adults a A$5 (£2.65) discretionary fee from which children, the elderly and those on state benefits would be exempt.

Faced with a collapse in commodity prices and an unruly upper house that has

held Mr Abbott’s first budget hostage since May, voters have abandoned his conservative government more quickly than any other in three decades.

He forecast ballooning deficits when he released a budget packed with deregulations, new levies and spending cuts, but the public has never accepted his plan.

And last week Education Minister Christopher Pyne shelved for the year the government’s plan to deregulate university fees after failing to garner enough votes to push it through parliament.

On Sunday Mr Abbott succumbed to pressure and radically pared back his paid parental leave scheme, which had upset big business and many in his own party.

The Labour Party has surged ahead of the government in opinion polls by a margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent.