A critic who wanted Albury Council to not host an economic, religious and political conference at its entertainment centre should be "ashamed" of his stance, the event's organiser says.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
"He should keep in mind he lives in a democracy where we have a contest of ideas," Mr Field said.
"He should be ashamed of his opinion."
Mr McFarland had argued the event was designed to spread "hate and misinformation".
"It is about the misuse of council-owned community facilities for extremely disturbing and offensive messaging - including homophobic messaging, climate change denial and most importantly - false health information which has led to the deregistration of a number of discredited health practitioners," he wrote to councillors.
Mr Field responded to that outline by saying "he's well and truly out of date", pointing to the federal government now acknowledging injuries caused by mRNA covid vaccines.
He also noted that unlike him Mr McFarland was not an Albury ratepayer.
"What we have here is a battle of ideas and I'm not really concerned about the opinion of armchair analysts that aren't involved in the battle of ideas," he said.
It was the first time the Triple Conference, which involved senators Malcolm Roberts (One Nation) and Ralph Babet (United Australia) and libertarian state MPs John Ruddick (NSW) and David Limbrick (Victoria), had been held in Albury.
"A lot of the speakers said how awesome Albury is and that's a big win, they came away raving and we had Chryslers on the Murray and the weather was great," Mr Field said.
"We had about 250 (attendees) which is roughly what we expected.
"We would always hope for more, but we weren't sure how many would travel to Albury and how many locals would come.
"Certainly the vibe in the room was fantastic."
However, Mr Field could not say whether the conference would be staged again in Albury.
"That's an open question," he said adding there needed to be consideration given to the amount of work involved in staging such an event outside a capital city.
The Triple Conference was first flagged in January and Mr Field said a longer lead time would be required to attract more interest in a future event.
Participants came from every state and the ACT at the weekend, but Mr Field was unable to say what percentage of onlookers were from the Border.
The conference featured a Nyet Zero dinner where five greenhouse gas emitters, including Russian president Vladimir Putin and Tesla car founder Elon Musk, were praised as "CO2 heroes" in relation to the former's warring and the latter's space exploits.
Senator Babet said he deliberately left the lights on in his Parliament House office at the end of the week and Mr Ruddick urged greater procreation "to encourage more carbon dioxide in the air".
"There is a huge silver lining with the global boiling delusion and that is stupid people believe it and stupid people don't have babies as a result of it," Mr Ruddick said.