**5. Conclusions**

Life satisfaction in NZ changed slightly over the study period, most likely due to major national and international events such as the Christchurch earthquakes and the GFC. Satisfaction with standards of living was found to be an important predictor of life satisfaction regardless of age or gender. These findings may provide a path for policy focus directed towards raising standards of living which will in turn increase life satisfaction. Policy may also be used to respond to the increasing social discourse on inequalities between income levels, genders and age groups which has been growing for some time in NZ and impacts life satisfaction. In line with other policy recommendations based on similar analyses internationally [28,72], Figure 6 implies that raising the living standards of New Zealanders with the lowest incomes might improve average life satisfaction more than raising them for those with the highest incomes.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/ 10.3390/ijerph19095612/s1, Table S1: Items used in study, Table S2: Prevalence of life satisfaction in NZ from 2006 to 2017.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualisation: R.J.J., M.J., D.W., M.H.S. and A.J.J.; data curation: M.J.; formal analysis: M.J.; investigation: M.J.; project administration: R.J.J. and M.J.; resources: M.J.; visualization: M.J.; writing—original draft: R.J.J., M.J., D.W., M.H.S. and A.J.J.; writing—review and editing: R.J.J., M.J., D.W., M.H.S. and A.J.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of the Republic of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066611).

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
