The Social democratic Party (SDP) will ask that the welfare bill be withdrawn as it "tramples on socially endangered people" and if it becomes a law, the first thing the SDP will do upon coming to power will be to repeal it, SDP MP Davorko Vidovic told the press on Friday.
SDP vice president Milanka Opacic said the bill did not solve any problem but would cause more chaos and annul the little that was left of the welfare system in Croatia.
She said it was especially problematic that the bill eliminated institutional care for children under seven without having developed an alternative foster care system.
Vidovic said the bill showed that the people running the welfare system were incompetent and that the health and welfare minister had never talked about welfare in parliament.
He said the bill envisaged that a person owning an apartment worth HRK 322,600 (approx. 43,700 euros) was not entitled to welfare, even though 80 per cent of Croatians own a house or a flat, and that money should not be considered an asset when means testing for welfare, which he said meant that persons with hundreds of thousands of euros in their accounts would be entitled to welfare, whereas those owning real estate would not.
Social workers will have to become taxmen appraising someone's property as well as judges establishing whether someone was responsible for losing their job and denying their request for welfare.
Instead of deinstitutionalising and decentralising, the bill proposes institutionalising and centralising the system, which is an attack on those socially endangered, the SDP officials said.
