Labour Leader Helen Clark outlined her vision for a better New Zealand in a speech to a campaign rally in Christchurch this afternoon.

"This is not just an election campaign for Labour. What we have launched is a crusade to reclaim our country and rebuild it around the values the great majority of New Zealanders cherish.

"While National and Act have promoted selfishness, self-interest, and meanness, we New Zealanders overwhelmingly remain a generous and fair minded people.

"We worry about the pressures on hard-working families, the effect of the super cuts on our older people, the growing costs of education for our young people, the lack of access to public health care, and the growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots."

Miss Clark said Labour will abandon the free market purism of National and Act.

"We will get New Zealand back on track with decent policies to: grow our businesses, employ our people, educate and train our young, treat the sick, look after the old, and take the pressures off our families.

"We have a vision of a nation in the new century which is confident, bold, energetic, creative, caring and which has the ability to provide a decent living for all.

"In contrast, National is talking down to New Zealanders. It tells us we've never had it so good and that tax cuts are the answer to every problem. But New Zealand families have seen the other side of tax cuts in the pressures on our schools, our hospitals, our students, our old people, our police and the other basic services we rely on.

"After nine years of meanness and misery there is a groundswell in New Zealand for a change of direction. National and ACT offer more of the same - more asset sales, more user pays and more riches for the few.

"Labour will lead change in a different direction, to a fairer nation offering opportunity and security. We will govern for the many, not the few.

That's the kind of nation I will be proud to lead and it's the kind of nation I will be proud to live in," Helen Clark said.

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