As another former NSW premier, Bob Carr, learnt when he made the leap into federal politics, you cannot run the largest Australian state without collecting some political baggage.

If Carr's baggage was weighty after a decade at the helm in NSW, Kristina Keneally's is fairly described as truly excess.

Within minutes of the announcement that she will contest the Bennelong byelection, Health Minister Greg Hunt described her as a protege of the jailed, corrupt former Labor minister Eddie Obeid.

Hunt's shot was unsurprising and he is right: Keneally, like many other Labor MPs at the time, was taken under Obeid's wing when he and Joe Tripodi were kingmakers in the ALP caucus.