(1) (a) The Supreme Court

The estimate is based on a number of factors including:

� the number of days in the year available for Supreme Court sittings;

(b) The Magistrates Court

The estimate is based on the total number of working days available during the year, less an allowance for recreation leave and a small allowance for sick leave, multiplied by the number of full-time judicial officers available.

The definition does not include motions lists or conferences conducted by the Registrar or the Deputy Registrars.

(2) Supreme Court-The estimated number of sitting days for resident judges, additional judges and the master are given as one figure. In this financial year, the estimate is 800. The estimate for the Registrar/Deputy Registrar is 150.

Magistrates Court-In this financial year, the estimate estimated number of sitting days is 1700. This figure is based on the total number of available days per judicial officer which is 220 and there are currently eight full time magistrates

Following the appointment of an additional full time magistrate, no allowance was made in the current year, for sittings by special magistrates, however, an allowance of 100 days has been added to next years estimates for this purpose

(3) A "court sitting day" is every day that a judicial officer sits in court irrespective of the length of time spent in court.

(4) The Record of Proceedings completed for every matter listed before the court records the time the matter commenced and concluded. No running total is kept, nor is any record kept of the time spent in court by any particular judicial officer. No other records are kept, or are required to be kept by the court.

Claim for payment forms are submitted by part time judicial officers (special magistrates). These forms set out the number of hours spent in actual court sittings and in the preparation of cases, which are aggregated into full days by personnel staff for payment purposes. Whilst special magistrates sat on 74 separate days during the March quarter, this would not equate to 74 court sitting days for payment purposes.

(5) See answer to Question (4).