The Future of Social Care in New Zealand: Demography, Workforce, Technology and System Reform

New Zealand's next generation of social care will not be shaped by one reform, one technology or one funding decision. It will emerge from the interaction of several changes already becoming visible: a larger and more diverse older population, increasing demand for support at home, pressure on aged residential care, evolving disability support, a workforce that must grow and change, greater expectations of personal choice, and a need to make public investment sustainable over decades rather than individual budget cycles.

Across the wider New Zealand social care and community-services system, these pressures increasingly converge. An older person remaining at home affects home-support capacity, primary care, family and whānau, housing and potentially hospital demand. A shortage of care workers constrains both community and residential options. Disability funding reform changes not only budgets but the relationship between people, providers and government. Digital systems can improve coordination, but only where infrastructure, workforce capability, accessibility and trust develop alongside them.

The future question is therefore larger than whether New Zealand needs more care. It concerns what kind of support system can remain effective as population needs, expectations and resources change. Better Later Life – He Oranga Kaumātua provides a long-term direction for ageing, while the 2025–2028 Action Plan identifies immediate priorities. In August 2026, the independent Aged Care Ministerial Advisory Group proposed substantial structural reform through A Place to Grow Old: Securing the Future of Aged Care. Those recommendations are an input to future government decisions, not an already implemented replacement system. That distinction is central to understanding what comes next.

Demography will change the scale and shape of demand

New Zealand's population ageing is no longer primarily a distant planning issue. Around 900,000 people are currently aged 65 or over, with the number expected to reach approximately 1.3 million by 2040. The significance is not simply the growth of one age group. The population aged into later old age will also expand, increasing the number of people potentially living with frailty, dementia mate wareware, multiple long-term conditions or greater support needs.

Demand will not rise uniformly. Many people will remain healthy, independent and active for substantial periods of later life. Others will require intermittent assistance, adaptations or rehabilitation rather than continuous care. A smaller proportion will need intensive home support, aged residential care or complex health and social support.

This makes future demand modelling more sophisticated than applying today's service utilisation rates to tomorrow's population. Housing, prevention, technology, health status, family structures and service design can alter trajectories.

It also makes geography increasingly important. Population ageing may affect communities differently, while rural areas can experience higher delivery costs, thinner provider markets and more constrained workforce supply. Māori and Pacific populations have different demographic profiles and patterns of health need. National forecasts therefore need to be translated into local capacity decisions rather than treated as one national demand curve.

The wider discipline of demand and capacity planning becomes particularly important. The relevant evidence includes not only how many people currently receive services, but who is waiting, where informal care is compensating for unavailable provision, which communities have limited choice and where health-system activity may indicate unmet community need.

Organisations examining these relationships can use the Digital Twin Scenario Modeller to test different combinations of demand, workforce and service capacity. It is not a forecasting model for New Zealand's statutory system, but the scenario discipline is relevant: future planning needs to test interactions rather than extrapolate individual services in isolation.

Ageing in place will require investment beyond home support

New Zealand's policy direction strongly reflects the desire of many older people to remain independent and connected to their communities. Better Later Life places living well at the centre of ageing policy, and the 2026 aged-care advisory report recommends significantly strengthening support for ageing well in place.

The future of community care will consequently depend on whether ageing in place is treated as an entire support environment rather than a cheaper alternative to residential provision.

A sustainable model connects suitable housing, primary and community health care, home and community support services, rehabilitation, equipment, transport, social connection, digital support and assistance for family and whānau. Each component can affect the others. An inaccessible home may increase support requirements. Delayed equipment can reduce independence. Poor continuity of home support may allow deterioration to go unnoticed. Limited primary-care access can increase reliance on urgent services.

Future policy will therefore need to distinguish between being physically located at home and genuinely living independently and participating in community life.

That distinction also affects funding. Expanding home-based support may require investment before savings or reduced demand appear elsewhere. If community capacity is increased only after hospital or residential pressure becomes acute, the system remains reactive.

The stronger opportunity is to model community infrastructure as long-term care capacity in its own right.

Residential care will remain necessary, but its role will change

A future centred on ageing in place does not remove the need for aged residential care. It changes the population most likely to use it.

As people remain at home for longer, those eventually entering residential care may increasingly have greater frailty, dementia, nursing needs or multiple conditions. This changes workforce skill requirements, building design, clinical relationships and the economics of provision.

Residential capacity also needs to be understood geographically. A nominal national supply of beds does not help a person whose local facility cannot accept them at the level of care required. In smaller communities, the loss of one facility can affect hospital flow, family proximity and the ability of older residents to remain within their community.

The independent 2026 aged-care advisory report places both home-based support and future residential capacity within the same reform conversation. That is strategically important. Planning one without the other risks moving pressure rather than resolving it.

Future residential models may increasingly combine long-term care with stronger clinical links, dementia expertise, rehabilitation interfaces and technology-supported monitoring. Retirement villages and continuum-of-care developments may also continue to shape options for some older people, although affordability and contractual arrangements mean they cannot provide a universal solution.

The central planning question is therefore not whether New Zealand should choose home care or residential care. It is how the country creates enough appropriate capacity across both while enabling people to move between forms of support as needs change.

Operational scenario: a regional population grows older faster than its care infrastructure

A region's demographic projections show substantial growth in the number of residents entering their eighties over the next decade. Current service utilisation appears manageable, so immediate pressure is limited. Beneath the headline numbers, however, several indicators are moving in the same direction: home-support recruitment is becoming harder, a residential facility is considering whether future capital investment remains viable, general practices report increasing complexity, and hospital teams are seeing more older people whose recovery depends on community support.

Treating each issue separately produces familiar responses: recruitment activity for home support, individual discussions with the residential provider and work on hospital flow. A future-focused approach treats them as one capacity problem.

Population projections are combined with housing patterns, residential-bed supply, home-support workforce, primary-care access, dementia prevalence, hospital activity and likely family-carer capacity. Several scenarios are modelled rather than one forecast.

The analysis shows that strengthening home and community support could moderate residential demand, but only if workforce supply and housing adaptations expand at the same time. It also identifies a continuing need for additional higher-acuity residential capacity.

The value lies in acting before unmet need becomes the main evidence of shortage. Future social care will increasingly require this form of anticipatory planning: using multiple signals to decide where capacity should develop years before every service is operating at its limit.

Funding reform will become increasingly difficult to separate from service reform

New Zealand's long-term support arrangements currently combine public funding, assessment and eligibility processes, means-tested residential-care assistance, personal contributions, disability funding, ACC support for covered injuries, private expenditure and extensive unpaid care.

Population ageing places greater attention on how that combination remains financially sustainable.

The 2026 A Place to Grow Old report specifically examines future funding and the balance between public and personal contributions. Its recommendations should be understood as proposals rather than settled future policy. The debate they create is nevertheless likely to remain important because funding design influences much more than government expenditure.

Payment arrangements shape provider viability, workforce pay, investment, service availability and incentives between home and residential care. Means-testing affects households differently. Personal contributions raise questions about fairness between generations and between people with different assets, incomes and care needs. Family care can conceal costs that never appear in formal care budgets.

Future funding reform therefore needs to examine distribution as well as total expenditure. Who pays, for what, at what stage of need, with which protections and with what consequences for access are separate questions.

Organisations examining complex purchasing and evidence relationships can use the Commissioner Evidence Builder to structure the connection between requirements, delivery evidence and outcomes. Although its terminology is not a model of New Zealand's funding architecture, the underlying discipline is useful: funding arrangements work best when decision-makers can see what resources are purchasing and whether intended outcomes are actually being achieved.

The workforce will determine how much reform can actually be delivered

New Zealand can redesign funding, expand entitlements and develop new models, but care capacity remains dependent on people.

The future workforce challenge is therefore broader than filling current vacancies. It involves deciding what roles will be required as people live longer with more complex needs, how workers can develop careers, how nursing and support-worker capacity is distributed, how international recruitment fits alongside domestic workforce development and how technology changes rather than simply removes work.

Home and community support presents particular challenges because workforce availability has to match people geographically and temporally. A worker may technically be available within a region while travel makes a particular package impractical. Fragmented hours can weaken the employment proposition and continuity for the person receiving support.

Aged residential care faces a related but different challenge as resident acuity increases. Skill mix, nursing availability, dementia capability, supervision and clinical escalation become increasingly important.

Migration is likely to remain part of the workforce response. New Zealand's Care Workforce Work to Residence pathway recognises several care and support occupations, reflecting the contribution international workers already make. Sustainable migration policy, however, needs to consider retention and integration as well as entry. Housing, family settlement, cultural orientation, career progression and employment quality influence whether internationally recruited workers remain in the sector and in the communities where they are most needed.

The future also requires stronger workforce resilience and continuity. A system that repeatedly replaces departing staff may maintain headcount while losing relationships, experience and productivity.

The Predictive Workforce Risk Module offers a way to structure earlier examination of turnover, vacancies and continuity. Its relevance is the move from treating workforce pressure as an HR statistic towards recognising it as an indicator of future service capacity and quality.

Future productivity will depend on redesigning work, not simply accelerating it

Workforce scarcity inevitably creates pressure for productivity. In care, however, productivity needs careful definition.

Completing more visits per worker may appear efficient while reducing continuity or making schedules unrealistic. Increasing documentation can improve assurance while consuming time that could be spent with people. Technology can remove duplication but can also create additional recording requirements if systems do not integrate.

The stronger productivity opportunity lies in reducing work that adds little value while protecting the relational and practical work that care depends upon.

Digital rostering can reduce travel and improve matching. Shared information can prevent repeated assessments. Voice-enabled documentation may eventually reduce administrative time where privacy and accuracy are properly governed. Remote clinical support can extend specialist expertise into rural areas. Better equipment can reduce manual workload and increase independence.

Some tasks may also shift between roles as workforce models evolve, but delegated activity requires training, competence, supervision and clear accountability. Workforce redesign cannot become a mechanism for transferring clinical risk to lower-paid workers without the infrastructure required to support them.

The future measure of productivity should therefore include outcomes, continuity and worker sustainability alongside volume.

Disability support will continue testing the relationship between control and system sustainability

New Zealand's disability system has already moved further towards person-directed principles through Enabling Good Lives, flexible funding and approaches intended to increase choice and control.

The institutional architecture has also changed. Disability Support Services transferred to the Ministry of Social Development in 2024, while Whaikaha – Ministry of Disabled People retains disability-policy and system-leadership responsibilities. During 2026, changes to assessment, allocation and flexible-funding arrangements have sought greater consistency and financial control while retaining important elements of flexibility.

The future challenge will be to preserve self-determination while ensuring that public funding remains transparent, equitable and sustainable.

That tension should not automatically be framed as choice versus control by government. The stronger objective is to create reliable rules around fairness and accountability while allowing people's lives to remain different.

Enabling Good Lives remains important because its principles begin with ordinary life outcomes rather than predefined service categories. As disability support evolves, maintaining that orientation will matter. Administrative consistency should make the system easier to understand and fairer to navigate rather than progressively narrowing individual possibility.

Future governance will also need better evidence of outcomes. Expenditure and service utilisation reveal only part of whether support is effective. Independence, relationships, participation, employment, housing stability and the person's experience of control can provide a richer picture.

This aligns with outcomes-focused support, where accountability considers what changes in people's lives rather than only what funded activity has occurred.

Operational scenario: artificial intelligence identifies risk, but people still make the decision

A large community-support organisation begins using an artificial-intelligence tool to identify people whose records suggest increasing risk of deterioration. The system examines changes in missed visits, incident reports, support-worker observations and patterns of service use. One older person's record is flagged because several small changes have occurred within six weeks.

None would independently have triggered urgent intervention. Together they suggest declining mobility and possible increased falls risk.

The technology does not automatically alter the person's support. A coordinator reviews the underlying information, speaks with the person and whānau with appropriate consent, and arranges clinical reassessment through the relevant health pathway. The review identifies a medication issue and a change in mobility that can be addressed without immediately increasing long-term support.

The governance value lies partly in what happens after the individual intervention. Leaders examine whether similar patterns are occurring across the service and whether the algorithm produces different results for particular populations. False positives and missed cases are reviewed. Workers can challenge automated recommendations, and the organisation remains accountable for decisions rather than attributing them to software.

This illustrates a plausible future use of AI in New Zealand care rather than established national practice. Its potential lies in strengthening human judgement and identifying patterns earlier. Its legitimacy depends on data quality, privacy, explainability, equity, workforce confidence and clear responsibility for the final decision.

Technology will become infrastructure, but digital inclusion will remain a care issue

Digital systems are likely to become increasingly embedded across assessment, care planning, scheduling, monitoring, communication and quality assurance. Artificial intelligence may add new capabilities in prediction, workflow automation, documentation and analysis.

The future opportunity is substantial because New Zealand's care system crosses multiple organisational boundaries. Better information exchange could reduce duplication and improve continuity between hospitals, primary care, home support, residential care and other services.

Yet interoperability is not simply a technical exercise. Organisations need agreement about what information is necessary, who can access it, how consent and privacy are managed, and who acts when information reveals a risk.

Digital exclusion will remain equally important. Older people vary greatly in digital confidence, connectivity and access to devices. Disabled people may require accessible interfaces and alternative communication formats. Rural connectivity can constrain technology that works well in urban settings.

Technology should consequently widen options rather than make digital participation a hidden condition of receiving support.

The Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment can help organisations examine strategy, infrastructure, cyber resilience, workforce adoption and governance before major digital change. The relevant principle for New Zealand's future is that technology becomes useful care infrastructure only when people, processes and accountability develop with it.

Māori leadership will remain central to whether reform improves equity

Future social care reform cannot be assessed only through national averages.

The Māori Health Strategy 2026 – Whiria Te Ora establishes a five-year direction focused on prevention and early intervention, quality and accountability, a resilient workforce and provider sector, and stronger Māori health leadership. Its long-term relevance to ageing is significant because later-life health and care needs reflect experiences accumulated across the life course.

For kaumātua, future models also need to recognise wellbeing in ways that extend beyond clinical status. Whānau, identity, whenua, cultural connection and community can be integral to how support is experienced.

The question is therefore not simply whether mainstream services become more culturally aware. It is whether Māori knowledge, providers, communities and leadership influence how future services are designed, evaluated and improved.

That makes cultural identity part of system architecture rather than a supplementary workforce-training topic.

Evidence also needs sufficient granularity to expose unequal access and outcomes. A national improvement can coexist with persistent inequity. Governance should be able to identify that distinction and respond.

Pacific ageing will become a more prominent part of future planning

New Zealand's Pacific population has historically had a younger age profile, but future growth in the number of older Pacific people means aged-care planning will increasingly need to reflect Pacific experiences and expectations.

There is no single Pacific model. Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands Māori, Niuean, Fijian, Tokelauan and other communities have distinct languages, identities and family structures. Service design should not turn collective concepts of family into assumptions about unlimited informal-care capacity.

Future planning needs to connect culturally responsive services with prevention, housing, financial security, workforce development and accessible information. Pacific workers and community providers can strengthen trust and cultural connection, but mainstream services retain responsibility for cultural capability and equitable access.

The larger lesson is demographic. Care systems built around the cultural profile of today's older population may not fit the population reaching later life in twenty years. Future readiness includes anticipating that change rather than adapting only after access disparities become entrenched.

Family and whānau support must become more visible in economic planning

Formal care systems frequently measure the services they purchase more accurately than the care they depend upon.

New Zealand's family, whānau and other unpaid carers provide substantial practical, emotional and coordinating support. Mahi Aroha recognises the contribution of carers and the importance of their health, wellbeing and financial security.

As formal demand grows, the future system will need to resist treating unpaid care as an infinitely expandable resource. Smaller families, workforce participation, geographic mobility and carers' own ageing can all affect future capacity.

This has direct consequences for public planning. If assumptions about family availability are unrealistic, apparently affordable service models can simply transfer cost into households through lost earnings, reduced wellbeing and increased responsibility.

Strong family and carer partnership therefore needs two perspectives simultaneously: recognising relationships as an asset in people's lives while recognising carers as people with their own rights, limits and aspirations.

Future evidence should make those pressures more visible. Carer breakdown, reduced employment, inability to use respite and increasing hours of informal support are not merely private family matters; they can be early indicators of system capacity problems.

Housing may become one of the most important forms of care infrastructure

The relationship between housing and social care is likely to become increasingly important as New Zealand's population ages.

A warm, secure and accessible home can sustain independence. A poorly designed home can turn relatively modest mobility limitations into substantial support needs. Location matters too: housing that is physically suitable but distant from transport, health services, family or community may still undermine ageing in place.

The Better Later Life Action Plan 2025–2028 identifies housing as one of its three priority areas alongside health and care services and cost of living. That reflects an important future direction: ageing policy cannot begin only when someone requires formal care.

Retirement villages will remain part of the housing landscape for people able and willing to choose them, while accessible mainstream housing, social housing and home adaptation will be important for a much broader population.

Future planning also needs to account for climate and emergency resilience. Severe weather, flooding, earthquakes, power interruption and transport disruption can affect people dependent on home support, medical equipment or regular assistance. As more people with significant needs live in ordinary housing, emergency preparedness increasingly becomes part of community-care design.

Operational scenario: a rural community designs around resilience rather than replicating an urban model

A rural district has an ageing population, limited residential capacity and persistent difficulty recruiting care workers. Attempting to reproduce the service configuration used in a major city has produced unstable rosters and long travel times.

A future redesign begins with local conditions. The service maps where older people live, primary-care availability, Māori providers, community organisations, transport, broadband coverage, workforce skills and the location of residential and hospital services.

Rather than relying on one intervention, it develops a networked model. Local support workers receive stronger development and clinical escalation support. Some specialist input is provided remotely, while hands-on care remains local. Scheduling is redesigned around geographic clusters. Relationships with local Māori organisations strengthen culturally grounded access. Emergency plans identify people whose support would become unsafe if roads, power or communications were disrupted.

The model does not eliminate rural constraints. Some specialist services still require travel and workforce recruitment remains difficult. Its advantage is that the design reflects the community rather than treating distance as an operational exception.

National governance uses the experience differently too. Higher rural delivery costs are not automatically interpreted as inefficiency. Decision-makers examine whether the funding model adequately recognises travel, small-scale provision and the value of maintaining local capacity.

New Zealand's future system will need this kind of differentiated implementation if national expectations are to produce equitable outcomes across very different communities.

Integration needs to become an operating capability

Older and disabled people experience one life while services operate through multiple organisations and funding arrangements.

A person may interact with a general practice, hospital, pharmacy, home-support provider, needs assessment service, aged residential care, Disability Support Services, ACC and family members at different points. Each organisation can perform its own function correctly while the overall experience remains fragmented.

Future integration therefore needs to be judged at interfaces.

Can information move appropriately? Is responsibility clear when needs change? Can a support worker's observation reach the right clinical professional? Can hospital teams understand what is realistically available at home? Can a person and their whānau understand who is coordinating the next step?

Organisational restructuring may sometimes help, but integration cannot depend on structural reform alone. It is an operational capability involving relationships, information, escalation, shared expectations and accountability.

This is particularly important because disability support and health now span different central government portfolios. Administrative separation increases the importance of designing the interface deliberately rather than assuming coordination will occur naturally.

Governance will need to become more predictive

Traditional assurance often explains what has already happened: incidents last quarter, current vacancies, complaints received, expenditure against budget or audit findings.

Future care systems need those measures, but they also need evidence that reveals emerging instability.

Useful leading indicators might include increasing use of overtime, declining continuity, longer assessment-to-service intervals, repeated provider refusals, growing family-carer strain, changes in hospital presentations, deterioration in workforce retention or geographic areas where nominal capacity is becoming unavailable in practice.

This changes the purpose of decision-making and escalation. Escalation should not occur only after an individual adverse event. Patterns can justify system intervention before severe harm or service failure occurs.

The Quality Dashboard Builder offers a practical way for organisations to structure relationships between quality, workforce, experience and performance evidence. It does not replace New Zealand's national or provider-specific assurance arrangements; its relevance is the principle of bringing multiple signals together so that governance can recognise changing risk.

Operational scenario: reform is judged by what changes for the person

New Zealand introduces a future package of aged-care reforms following government consideration of the 2026 advisory recommendations. New funding arrangements and service structures are implemented over several years.

Programme reporting initially concentrates on implementation milestones: contracts changed, systems introduced, providers transitioned and new funding flows established. Those measures show whether reform machinery is operating, but they do not establish whether older people's lives have improved.

The evaluation framework is widened.

It examines whether people obtain support earlier, whether home-support continuity improves, whether family carers feel more sustainable, whether Māori and Pacific access gaps narrow, whether rural communities retain viable provision, whether hospital use changes appropriately and whether people experience greater choice about where and how they live.

Provider viability and workforce stability are monitored alongside those outcomes because short-term improvement that depends on an increasingly fragile workforce would not represent sustainable reform.

The evaluation also looks for unintended effects. If stronger home support reduces residential demand in one area but increases unpaid family workload elsewhere, that trade-off becomes visible.

This is the governance test that will ultimately matter for any future reform: not whether the new architecture resembles its original policy design, but whether implementation produces better, fairer and more sustainable outcomes in everyday life.

The strongest future model will connect prevention, support and care

New Zealand's future social-care challenge cannot be solved entirely within the boundaries of social care.

Prevention and early intervention can delay or reduce some support needs. Primary and community health care can identify deterioration earlier. Accessible housing can protect independence. Employment and income security influence wellbeing. Transport and community infrastructure affect participation. Digital inclusion increasingly determines whether people can access information and services.

The 2026 Māori Health Strategy – Whiria Te Ora places prevention and early intervention among its priorities and emphasises stronger primary and community care, including improved continuity between hospital, specialist and community services. Better Later Life similarly links later-life wellbeing with conditions extending beyond formal care.

This does not mean prevention will remove the need for long-term support. Population ageing means substantial care capacity will still be required. The stronger opportunity is to ensure people do not require more intensive support earlier than necessary because avoidable barriers were left unresolved.

The future system therefore needs both prevention and dependable care. Presenting one as an alternative to the other would underestimate demographic reality.

What success could look like by the 2030s

There is no single institutional design that guarantees sustainable social care. New Zealand's direction can instead be assessed through the capabilities the system develops.

• Older people can remain at home where this genuinely supports independence, with residential care available when it becomes the better option.
• Disabled people experience meaningful choice and control within funding arrangements that are understandable, equitable and sustainable.
• Māori and Pacific communities influence service design and experience measurable improvement in access and outcomes.
• Care work offers stronger continuity, skills and career prospects, supported by responsible migration where international recruitment remains necessary.
• Technology reduces fragmentation and administrative burden without excluding people or displacing human accountability.
• Funding, quality and workforce evidence are connected so emerging capacity problems can be addressed before they become service breakdowns.

These are demanding tests because they require coordination across policy areas and institutions. They also recognise that future sustainability is not purely financial. A service may be affordable in accounting terms while remaining unsustainable because workers leave, families cannot continue or local provision disappears.

International learning from New Zealand's next phase

New Zealand's future direction will be watched internationally because many of the pressures it faces are shared: ageing populations, workforce scarcity, demand for greater autonomy, fiscal constraints and the challenge of coordinating health with long-term support.

Its institutional solutions will remain distinctly New Zealand's. Te Tiriti relationships, Māori health leadership, the structure of publicly funded health services, ACC, disability arrangements and the country's geography cannot simply be exported.

The transferable lesson lies instead in how the system manages competing objectives. Community support must expand without making family care compulsory. Personalisation needs accountability without becoming standardisation. Technology should improve capacity without reducing human connection. Workforce productivity needs to protect quality. Funding reform needs to consider access as well as expenditure.

Other countries can adapt those questions to their own institutions. New Zealand, in turn, will continue learning from international approaches to financing, housing, workforce, integrated care and technology. The future is more likely to emerge through adaptation than through one imported model.

Conclusion

The future of social care in New Zealand will be determined less by whether demand rises than by how early the country adapts to that reality. Population ageing is already changing the scale of the challenge, while disability reform, workforce pressures, housing, digital technology and changing expectations of autonomy are altering what people expect from support.

The strongest direction is not simply expansion of the existing system. New Zealand has an opportunity to connect ageing in place with dependable residential capacity, workforce strategy with funding, cultural responsiveness with decision-making authority, digital innovation with accessibility, and national policy with the realities of rural and local delivery. Current reform proposals, particularly those emerging from the 2026 aged-care review, may contribute substantially to that direction, but recommendations become meaningful only when government decisions, implementation and measurable outcomes follow.

Ultimately, sustainability has a human test. Older and disabled people need to be able to live with dignity, choice, safety and connection; family and whānau need support that does not assume unlimited capacity; workers need conditions in which skilled care can become a sustainable career; and organisations need sufficient stability to plan beyond the next immediate pressure.

New Zealand's next phase will therefore be a test of adaptive capacity: whether evidence from communities, services, workforce and people's lives can continually reshape the system as the country itself changes.