I think Obama had a great idea.
If a company receives any of these bailout packages, be it cash, loans, whatever... Executive remuneration is capped at $500,000 a year. That's more than Rudd himself gets for being PM (that's $400,000 I checked).
In the last package, less than 1 billion of the 10 billion went into increasing retail sales.
What I'd do, is borrow the money, yes, but the government should spend it. Build new Hospitals, Schools, Railways, Roads, Dams, Pipelines (send some of these Queensland floods down the Dimmantina, therefore into the Darling, therefore into the Murray)
Spend the money on big projects. Buy something with the money, don't just give it to people in small doses. Then, yes, future generations will have a massive debt, but they will have the infrastructure to trade their way out of it.