In a pitch to voters, she tried to remind the town hall meeting that she’d “delivered for the region”.

The response?

Laughter. Sniggering. The crowd was not buying it.

Keneally wanted them to vote her back into the top job. But they’d never chosen her in the first place.

Keneally was an accidental premier, thrust into power by a series of factional plays that saw her inherit the final chapter of a dismal government.

She was, opinion polls from 2009 show, a relatively well-liked politician who, despite this, led the party to one of its most brutal losses after just 15 months in the job.

Labor’s plot to return to Keneally in a battle for the federal seat of Bennelong against tennis great and third-term MP John Alexander trusts that the people of NSW have forgotten, or forgiven, her time at the state’s helm.

In the history books, that time is now forever tied to the ghosts of corrupt factional warlords and slow economic times. Labor considers Keneally a “star candidate” — a term that relates to her profile rather than her record.

Treasurer Dominic Perrottet took it upon himself to lay out a picture of NSW in 2010 this week in state Parliament Question Time: “I have a long-lost report here, the CommSec State of the States report from January 11, 2010,” Perrottet said, going on to outline the findings.

“It says on housing and construction, NSW is a long way behind; on unemployment, NSW is at the bottom of the pack; and overall, NSW continues to bring up the rear of the state and territory ratings, even behind the Northern Territory.”

While some measures, such as unemployment, improved during Keneally’s time in government, NSW languished at the back of the pack across the economic board.

Fast-forward to the most recent CommSec State of the States report. Perrottet told the Parliament it showed NSW to have the top-performing economy in the country — and it has held that position for 13 quarters running.

In an unconventional pitch to voters on day one of her 2011 election campaign, Keneally herself conceded her own government lost its way.

“While this government has achieved some great things for families, many would say that we recently lost our way, and they would be right,” Keneally said.

“We lost our way because we were too focused on ourselves, and not enough on what matters to families in this state. And for that, I am sorry.”

As well as being tied to a tough period for the NSW economy, Keneally is tied in the NSW psyche to an ugly time in the history of Labor’s factional power plays. She arrived at the premiership from an unusual pedigree.

Pre-selected in 2003 after a recommendation from her husband, she picked up a junior ministry — disabilities — in 2007, before later adding the planning portfolio to her resume.

Then in 2009, when powerbrokers Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi looked around for someone to replace Nathan Rees — who had taken the fight for influence up to the factional lords — Keneally was it.

Rees uttered the famous words that would haunt Keneally through her premiership, and now threaten the spectre of her by-election.

“Should I not be Premier at the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community’s mind that any challenger would be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi,” Rees said.

Without the support of Obeid and Tripodi, Keneally would not have risen to the top in 2009.

Rees and his predecessor Morris Iemma both declined when asked to be interviewed this week about Keneally’s return to politics.

Iemma’s predecessor Bob Carr, however, heaped praise on Keneally, saying he was “delighted” she was running and that she was a woman of integrity.

Former Carr government minister Carl Scully — who was forced to resign by Iemma in 2006 over a delay in releasing the report into the Cronulla riots — used his memoirs to lash the Labor government over infrastructure. He described Keneally as being “asleep at the infrastructure wheel”.

Speaking of the three Labor post-Carr premiers, Scully wrote: “The Iemma-Rees-Keneally governments should have built the Northwest Rail Link as well as the M4 East and M1 to M2 motorways, but instead they squandered the opportunity to do so.

“The current Liberal National Party state government is now getting on and building major rail and road infrastructure across Sydney and fully exploiting the fact that the three post-Carr premiers were simply asleep at the infrastructure wheel.”

Campaigning this week, in an attempt to defend her record in infrastructure, Keneally has repeatedly said that a Parramatta to Epping rail link would be built had she stayed in power.

She secured federal funding for the project in the dying months of her premiership but it wasn’t enough to secure the votes she needed for a second term.

Labor has tried to paint Keneally as a star candidate. But her history in NSW politics has been well- documented. Labor cannot rewrite it now.

The Coalition will continue to target that record until Bennelong goes to the polls.

It will be Keneally’s task to prove she’s more than her past.