Labor has forced the Government to table its Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) amendment regulations in the Senate.

It means the changes can be debated, and possibly defeated, when the upper house resumes today.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann says the Government always intended to table the regulations, but not while the Senate was debating a number of bills, including the carbon tax repeal. He says the delay was intended to allow senators to understand the changes.

Senator Cormann had planned to table the regulations tomorrow before a statutory deadline passes.

But last Thursday Labor senator Sam Dastyari told the Senate the Coalition wanted to delay the debate.

“Let us be clear: this is not about giving people an opportunity to understand [the regulations],” he said.

“The minister knows the will of the Senate on this issue. This is about delay, delay, delay.”

Senator Dastyari says the FOFA changes are important because they will allow the return of commissions and conflicted remuneration.

“The minister repeatedly has said at different points in time that by watering down these reforms, by adopting his regulation, it will not return to commissions or sales incentives or conflicted remunerations.

“He said those matters are not going to come back. Frankly, that is not the case at all.”

Senator Dastyari says the proposed amendments remove protections set out in the original FOFA legislation.

“There are too many stories of people being ripped off,” he said.

“It is wrong for the Government to want to side with a handful of crooks, shonks and conmen who have given the financial services industry a bad name and are salivating at the opportunity to go back to the bad old days of financial advice, when the regulation was at a minimum.”

The Government lost a vote calling for the regulations to be tabled, as crossbenchers combined with Labor and Greens senators.