Col, are you talking about the difference between single member electorates (HoR) and multiple member electorates (Senate) or the difference between PR and FPP in general?

What you say only makes sense if you're talking about the former. In single member electorates FPP is atrocious because it often results in someone being elected even though the majority of the electorate prefers a different person. It is a little better for multiple member electorates, but there is another problem in that any extra votes for elected candidates are discarded.

Whoops I confused proportional representation with preferential voting there.

Anyways, count me on the side of those who support proportional representation - for the reasons Aker outlined. Our current system may be more stable but it isn't more democratic.

Deuc and Aker, I am with Col and Paul on the craziness of Proportional representation for the lower house. Comrades, if you want democracy (irony intended) in the house of reps, look no further then Condorcet.

I think Proportional representation would and does work well in the senate though. In my model the senate would no longer be the states house, which is in name only, but would become the house of the diverse society and a proper check against the government of the day.

There should 38 members including the speaker in the senate, 19 of which are chosen at a time, with the whole of Australia as the electorate. Candidates would be elected with a quota of 5%. Voting would be as outlined in Antony Green's latest article on OLO.

Thanks Deuc and Penekiko. It's comforting that I'm not completely alone re electoral democracy.
Penekiko, the Condorcet method seems to be perhaps the most effective way to run a preferential voting system. Well and good; but this would still produce a single representative for a greatly diverse constituency. By definition, such an outcome would leave many constituents represented by someone who disagrees with them. In other words, Condorcet, like all WTA systems leaves many citizens without genuine representation. Such an outcome is the antithesis of democracy.
Penekiko's comments about reforming the Senate are interesting. First the concession that "Proportional representation would and does work well in the senate". Would you also concede that contentious issues are subjected to more democratic consideration in the partly proportional Senate than in the WTA Reps? That, of course, will change when the Government 'has the numbers' in the Senate.
If so, then why not leave the Senate alone, and reform the Reps into a single national electorate?
An important point is that PR would require more elected representatives, not less.
The nearest to full PR that I know of is the Dutch lower house - a single national electorate with 150 members, giving a quota of c0.67%.
In fact, there need not be a numerical quota. Very small interest groups who meet criteria of needing representation could be accommodated if proportional parliamentary votes were allowed. This would allow very small bona fide interest groups representation.
Scoffers please note that very small interest groups can be quite large: 1% of the national electorate would now be more than 130,000 voters; 0.5%, more than 65,000 voters.
Any representative system which bars such numbers of its citizens the right of ever being represented is NOT representative - fails to meet its mandate.
Our electoral system - which claims to be a representative democracy - fails to meet its mandate - by a long way. A more accurate name for our system might be a pseudo-democratic oligarchy.

I'm not sure if your plan is the best way Penekiko. The Senate at the moment cannot propose money bills and has less consideration for double dissolution tiebreakers, so the lower house is more powerful. Why should the less democratic of the two houses have the advantage? (Admittedly the senate rotations makes this less true.) If the problem is that no majority may exist to form a government, then take away that question from the Parliament and put it to the people.

Fully separating the legislative and executive branches could encourage members not to vote simply along party lines. And the proportional voting method could be designed to further encourage it, but this may bring in other problems. (I haven't fully thought this through) I also think the principle that a majority of people in the states must consent to a law is a good one, but it is becoming less important.

Aker, I think a condorcet candidate would be pretty much representative of everyone in the electorate, as close as possible. But it isn't the same as PR. I am writing an article for OLO on Condorcet voting as a better system for single member electorates, but I don't take up the winner-take-all vs PR argument. There are many ways you could design either government with various possible and unintentional outcomes, that will take a fair bit of thinking.

So if we did introduce PR for the HoR is suspect it would be in our interests to have a close examination of the constitution as well. So I haven't completely made up my mind, but if we're going to have single member electorates, then condorcet is the way.