Australian police have been authorised to use force to get asylum seekers on board planes for their transfer to Malaysia, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said today.

The first boatload of asylum seekers to fall under the terms of a recently signed migrant-swap deal with Malaysia arrived in Australia at the weekend after setting sail from Indonesia.

The 54 refugees - mostly Afghan, Iraqi and Iranian males - were to be held in a high-security compound on Christmas Island until they are flown to Kuala Lumpur.

“Obeying instructions is not a question of volunteering,” Gillard told the national broadcaster ABC when asked whether force would be used. “It means taking appropriate steps to get people to board the plane and disembark the plane at the other end.”

In a deal signed last week, Malaysia agreed to take the next 800 asylum seekers to land in Australia, who tend to be mostly from the Middle East.

In return, Kuala Lumpur is to send about 4,000 UN-approved refugees, mostly from Burma, in the other direction.

Gillard conceded her government could not yet meet its promise that asylum seekers would be on planes within three days of arrival because of delays in arranging accommodation in Kuala Lumpur.

“When the system is up and in full operation, those returns will happen in 72 hours,” she said, but did not indicate when that might be.

Gillard has said sending some arrivals straight on to Malaysia would deter those waiting in Indonesia from paying people smugglers for a passage to Australia.

Opposition Liberal Party immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison said the deal would not deliver the desired outcome. He pointed out that since the deal was announced May 7, 12 boats had arrived with a total of 621 asylum seekers.

An original proposal to apply the swap from May 7 was dropped, and the deal is to now only be applied to migrants landing in Australia after July 25 when the agreement was signed.

But if those 621 who arrived in the past three months had been sent on to Malaysia, Sydney would already be close to exhausting its quota under a deal that has drawn widespread condemnation in Australia and internationally.

- dpa