The policy simulacrum: text, discourse and the hyperreal

Abstract

This paper explores how policy discourse is constructed, circulated and transformed within social media networks. Drawing on sentiment analysis of over 35,000 tweets authored between 2019 and mid-2022, we examine how the 2011 ‘Gonski report’, which recommended a more equitable and transparent school funding system in Australia, was taken up and reinterpreted on Twitter/X. Our analysis shows how policy meanings become detached from their original textual referents, resulting in a condition where what a document says and what it is believed to say become two different things. In theorising this, we draw from Ball’s work on discourse and enactment, and Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, where representations proliferate in ways that obscure or replace the real. We also incorporate Baudrillard’s idea of operational negativity and Laclau’s notion of the empty signifier to explain how policy acquires symbolic power through emotional resonance, ambiguity and scandal. Ultimately, we argue that Gonski functions as a hyperreal policy, that is, one that circulates more as a political, moral and ideological signifier, rather than as a technical funding model. This policy simulacrum is important in understanding how policy is taken up, how meaning circulates and what is assumed, desired and missed in such policy interpretations.