Unable to convince voters and the Senate to back its $7 GP co-payment for the past seven months, the government has decided to try to sneak past them with an amended version just as they start to relax into Christmas.

Children, pensioners and concession card holders will be exempt, under the new plan, but doctors will be able to choose to raise their fees to make up for the fact that the government rebate will decline by $5 per consultation. That’s the kind of choice made famous by a man called Hobson.

This policy isn’t as unfair as the original version, but it will undermine bulk billing for most patients – which was always its political point.

And despite requiring both legislation and regulation (which may be disallowed by the Senate) it has been announced after the parliament has risen, when the head of the Australian Medical Association is overseas and David Warner had just scored a century in the first Test against India.

Oh, and the prime minister said he was “certainly not ruling out” advertising on this policy although that was “not being currently contemplated”, just as the government is advertising the higher education reforms that have also been rejected by the Senate.

At least this backdown had some policy detail, unlike the weekend’s announcement about the paid parental leave scheme which was more a foreshadowing of a backdown sometime in the future.

But it is still making fundamental and contentious changes to a policy area which, according to the latest Essential poll, is ranked highest by voters in terms of importance.

Tony Abbott tried to make a virtue of necessity. He said the policy was better than the one he presented in the budget – which he had kept arguing until last week was in fact the best plan – because the government had been listening to the concerns of its own backbench.

The question now is whether he has waited so long, and squandered so much trust with broken promises and bickering, that the electorate has stopped listening to the government, or its arguments, or its advertising.

According to that same Essential poll, 65% of voters thought the past year has been a bad one for Australian politics. And 44% thought next year was unlikely to be any better.