Scott Morrison has openly acknowledged his government made mistakes during the coronavirus pandemic but said it was operating in a “fog of radical uncertainty” without a guidebook, and what ultimately mattered was that problems were overcome.

The Prime Minister also said it was time for governments to back off and give people back their freedom, but he claimed “some on the left of politics will draw precisely the wrong lesson from the pandemic” and view it as the pretext for permanent big government “across economic, social and cultural domains”.