HDZ spokesman Ratko Macek said the ideas presented at the SDP's convention reflected the demagogy of a party which 18 months before elections could not find a purpose to its political existence.
The government has been implementing for two and a half years already the "ideas and programmes" the SDP has suddenly thought of, said Macek.
He said the SDP had forgotten that workers, war veterans and child-bearing women had been deprived of their rights when the SDP led the previous coalition government.
The SDP cut by 40 per cent the salaries of 250,000 civil servants, thus simultaneously affecting as many families, said Macek, adding that cutting childbirth and children's allowances had stopped the demographic revival.
Macek went on to say that the former SDP-led government had denied the existence of the state's debt to pensioners, which he added the incumbent government was repaying.
SDP leader Ivica Racan said at the convention that his party wanted to offer Croatia changes, a socially responsible society in which a worker is not a commodity and labour and solidarity are high on the list of social values.
"We can't accept a society in which only those who can pay can get medical treatment or an education," he said, adding that the SDP wanted to help make Croatia's society socially just, one in which workers' rights will be more effectively protected and those who breach them harshly punished.