MUCH has been said about Scotland’s ongoing ferry fiasco which has left the network with a large number of passengers but hardly any ships.

It should be the gold standard of marine disasters, an exemplar to show the world how not to do things.

But it appears that Scotland’s ongoing chaos has been knocked off the top spot in the league table of shame for state-run ferry mishaps.

When I say mishaps, this is probably understating it a tad.

But a huge newly constructed ship is to be mothballed in Edinburgh as a result of a “ferries fiasco” on the other side of the world.

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The 212m-long (695ft) Spirit of Tasmania IV will be stored at Port of Leith because it is too large to fit the existing berths in the Australian city of Devonport.

The ferry was built at a shipyard in Finland but it has to be moved out before winter because it could be damaged by pack ice.

A new berth to accommodate the ship in the island state of Tasmania will not be ready until late 2026 or 2027.

The ship, and its sister vessel Spirit of Tasmania V, which is still being built, had previously been described as a “game changer” for Tasmania’s tourism industry.

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But construction delays, rising costs and the problems with upgrading the existing infrastructure have turned it into the state’s biggest political scandal in a decade.

The Australian media have described it as a fiasco and a debacle while opposition leader Dean Winter called it the biggest infrastructure stuff-up in the state’s history.

Both the ferry company TT-Line and the ports firm TasPorts are state-owned, and in August the Australian infrastructure minister, Michael Ferguson, and TT-line chairman, Mike Grainger, both resigned.

In recent days it has emerged that the berth in Devonport – that was supposed to be built by now – would not be completed until October 2026 at the earliest.

If all this sounds familiar, that’s because it pretty much mirrors the ongoing problems here.

What makes it worse is the ferries in Tasmania, like here, go from one large island, namely Australia, to another one and have done so for decades.

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Both Scotland and Australia have proud maritime heritages, chiefly because they have to as they are both on islands and the surrounding seas have been the only means to trade over the centuries.

But despite this being the 21st century, it appears that same sea is now proving difficult to harness, even over a relatively short distance.

One solution may be that CMAL “liberates” the stricken vessel from Leith and puts it to use plugging gaps in the network.

There are many skilled car thieves in Scotland after all, so I’m sure these skills could be transferable to ships.

With a bit of imagination and a lot of paint, the seafront in Brodick or Castlebay could get huge billboards with the Sydney or Melbourne skylines on them to make the ferry feel at home.

Nobody would suspect a thing.

Unfortunately, the vessel is far too large to dock at any port so it will just have to lay at Leith for the next two years reminding civil servants here of their own ferry folly as they pass it on the way to work.

Hopefully, they will hang their heads in shame in the process.