The judgment on the Smedley land swap so Ruataniwha dam can go ahead could be released early in the new year, Forest and Bird reports.
The decision will come from a judicial review that was held before the High Court's Justice Matthew Palmer.
Forest & Bird sought the review earlier this year following the decision made by Department of Conservation's (DOC) director general Lou Sanson to swap 22ha of the Ruahine Forest Park for 170ha of land the Hawke's Bay Regional Investment Company (HBRIC) will potentially buy from Smedley Station.
In its monthly report to Hawke's Bay Regional Council (HBRC), HBRIC chief executive Andrew Newman said the case principally came down to an argument from F&B and that DOC should have considered the 22ha revocation land conservation values in isolation and "depending on the results of an unclear test as to its conservation values, then either not progressed, or progressed to consider the exchange".
Forest and Bird's (F&B) campaign and advocacy general manager Kevin Hackwell refuted this claim, saying there was nothing "unclear" about the test used for the 22ha of land used in the Smedley land swap proposal.
He said however, while Mr Newman was right about the key argument, he has put his own spin on the idea that there is an unclear test.
"We don't think that it's quite that unclear and certainly the issue of the overall result for conservation is not something in the [conservation] Act," he said.
"It's not a test under the Act and that was one of the points we were making, whether the land did or didn't have its conservation values. So had it lost the values for which it was originally set aside as a special conservation area, and obviously we have argued that it hasn't."
Mr Hackwell said DOC revoked the land using the test for giving up stewardship land. He said the two categories of land have two different requirements and the department only used the weaker of those to revoke the conservation park status.
"And he argues that this is vague and we argue that it is not vague actually, that it is clear in the way it is done and that is why they couldn't do it originally," he said.
F&B lawyer Sally Gepp said specially protected areas were not up for barter, even if DOC could increase the amount of land it holds by bartering away some important areas sought by developers.
"The areas that are bartered away would then be destroyed, which is not a good outcome for conservation more broadly," she said. The second issue was whether the Director-General should have considered policies which say when and how land should be downgraded, she said.